Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  They had a breakfast of toast and fresh peaches and coffee, and while they ate, Lulu played a slow, dreaming little CD that, oddly, made Emily want to cry.

  “I like that,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Pavane pour une Infante Défunte,” Lulu said. “‘Pavane for a Dead Princess.’ An elegy played at the death of a little royal princess. Maurice Ravel wrote it. Funeral music at breakfast is a specialty of mine.”

  “That was French you spoke, wasn’t it?” Emily said. “At first? Do you speak French?”

  “You don’t get out of Charlotte Hall without speaking something besides English, and French is considered the language of diplomats and ladies,” Lulu grinned. “I’ll teach you some.”

  “I’d rather stick to pig Latin,” Emily said, and they laughed, and the day began.

  15

  OFTEN, IN THE HOT DAYS of that early fall, Emily would look at Lulu, lithe and golden as always, in the sunlight of the dog ring or the table’s candlelight, and would feel for the first time the fierce, obliterating love of a parent for a child.

  If she had examined it, she would have seen that it was a mocking sham of an emotion, and the moated Sweetwater an ersatz world, shimmering in the mists of unreality like a bewitched castle out of Le Mort d’Arthur. But she did not and could not examine it. She dimly knew that to lose that world would be to watch Lulu wither and die.

  And so all of Sweetwater—house, river, marshes, creek—and all living things in it—people, dogs, dolphins, even the nameless, one-celled creatures deep in the cradling mud—were protected by the circle of Emily’s power. “It’s going to be all right,” burned in the thickening September air like a great hovering planet.

  The next day was the Saturday before school started, and Emily and Lulu had the weekend off. Lulu slept late and mooched around the morning-cool little apartment in her nightgown, drinking coffee and absently straightening up the counters of the small kitchen. She was distant in the mornings, Emily would learn, and not to be chattered at or engaged in plans for the day.

  “Chill out, Emily,” she said on this first morning. “This is the only absolutely down time I have. The rest of the day will find itself.”

  And Emily, who could not sit still, took Elvis and a peach across the yard to the river and down to the dock, where they sat watching the tide churn into the river from the distant sea and soaked in the sights and sounds and smells of a larger marsh and wider water. There was a salt taste and smell to the air that you did not get on the creek, and the rustlings in the cordgrass were made by larger creatures than the creek harbored. Emily had not been to the river much that summer. It cast its net of living light over her once more, and it was nearly eleven o’clock when the blatting of a horn in the driveway pulled her back into the world.

  She heard Lulu calling her, faintly, and she and Elvis went back up the dock and around the house to the driveway. The red BMW convertible glimmered in the sun like a cauldron, its grillwork throwing off lances of light. Lulu stood beside it, dressed in white pants and a black T-shirt, hair freshly washed and shining eyes shielded by dark aviator glasses. She was grinning. Emily thought she looked like an Italian movie star, though she couldn’t have said why. She couldn’t remember ever seeing one.

  “Where did that come from?” Emily said, prowling around the car. Elvis sat in coppery dignity beside it, as if he was a doorman. He stared at the car and then up at Emily.

  “Are we going somewhere in this?” the yellow eyes asked. Elvis knew about trucks fitted with dog crates, and SUVs, and high-bouncing old cars, but he had never seen transport into which sunlight poured down on buttery smooth leather like syrup.

  “I don’t know,” Emily told him. “Would you like it?”

  He thumped his tail and lolled his tongue, grinning.

  “Leland just brought it out with some books and things Grand sent us. I asked him to when I called yesterday. Austerity is over. From now on you ride around like a south of Broad princess.”

  “Ride where?” Emily said suspiciously. She had hardly left the farm the entire summer, and as far as she knew, except for her grandmother’s party, Lulu had not left it at all.

  “For starters, to the grocery store. And then to the oyster place on Bowen’s Island for some fresh ones. And then, who knows? Have you ever been to Kiawah?”

  “No, and I don’t want to,” Emily sniffed. “I heard they had a gate and security people who wouldn’t let you in if you didn’t live there, and houses bigger than the ones on the Battery. It sounds awful.”

  “Well, I guess it is, sort of,” Lulu smiled. “I don’t think of it that way because Grand’s family had a big old wooden house on the beach for years down there, before the resort bought it. Grand can remember when the beaches were empty and white and beautiful. She used to run loose on them all day as naked as a jaybird and not see another soul except family. Okay. No Kiawah. How about Folly Beach?”

  Emily had been to Folly often. Its careless, sandy-rumped ambience and close-leaning beach shacks on stilts did not intimidate her the way a gated community would.

  “Okay,” she said. “But I don’t want to swim or anything. Just ride over there.”

  “Good. Hop in. We’ll eat shrimp at Sandy Don’s and be home by midafternoon. We’ve got to unpack books; Grand sent boxes and boxes of them.”

  They slid into the car. Beside the door, Elvis whined.

  “He’s coming with us, isn’t he?” Emily said. “He always comes with me and the boys, or Aunt Jenny. I’m not going off and leaving him.”

  “Will he stay still and not try to jump out?”

  “What do you think? Of course he will.”

  Lulu nodded and Emily patted the hot leather seat. Elvis soared over the closed door and settled into the space between the two seats.

  Lulu started the car and it purred out of the driveway and down the dirt road toward the highway. The wind was cool on their faces, and the sun was warm on shoulders and forearms. Riding so low was like being a part of the road. Elvis sat perfectly still in the circle of Emily’s arm, head up, ears streaming joyfully in the wind, golden eyes closed. When they reached the blacktop Lulu pushed her foot down on the accelerator. After that the countryside was a blur and the wind was as intoxicating as alcohol, and there was no sound but velvety, growling engine and wind. Emily leaned back and stretched, drunk on air. Lulu smiled at her.

  “Beats a Toyota all to hell, doesn’t it?” she said.

  In the big, cool Publix on the outskirts of Hollywood, Emily tagged along as Lulu filled a cart with food. When it was fully loaded, they put the food into the trunk of the BMW, laid a mylar blanket over it, and roared out of the parking lot. Heads turned to see the sleek little beast of a car and the three pretty heads in it, one gilt-blond, two burning red, blowing in the wind. Catcalls and whistles followed them from pickups and motorcycles.

  “A red BMW convertible is the ultimate sex toy,” Lulu grinned.

  They swept over to Highway 171 and down toward the sea, stopping at Bowen’s Island for a sack of still-dripping oysters just out of the wide creek, and then bowled into Folly Beach. Elvis nodded sleepily while they went into the scabrous, cool waterfront restaurant and had fresh boiled shrimp to peel and eat with red sauce. They brought him back a plain hamburger, which he ate sedately after consulting Emily with his yellow eyes. They stopped for hot boiled peanuts, and by three o’clock they were home, the groceries stashed away, the boxes of books surrounding them on the shining bare-wood floor of the apartment. Elvis lay stretched full-length on the sheepskin rug, watching them. It was only then that Emily realized that they had ventured far beyond the moat and she had never once thought about it. Perhaps there was a kind of magical protection in the two of them together. Strange. She would have to think about this.

  On the first of the boxes was a Post-it note with “Enjoy!” written on it in a sprawling backhand.

  “Grand,” Lulu said. “When I asked for some books, she said okay, as lo
ng as I let her pick them out. It’s fine with me. She knows what I love, and probably what you would, from knowing your brother.”

  The first box was entirely poetry, more volumes of poetry than Emily had ever seen. Most were old and dusty; Buddy had many like them. He had read a lot of it aloud, but had discouraged her from reading it alone.

  “Poetry is for when your mind catches up with your heart,” he had said. “Wait till you’re thirteen or so.”

  Emily was suddenly fiercely reluctant to hear any poetry in a voice other than his. “I don’t know if I want to plow through all that poetry,” she said, watching Lulu decant the books in towering, untidy piles. “I don’t much like poetry.”

  “You will when we get started,” Lulu said. “There’s some new stuff here, but most of them are old favorites. Grand and I used to read them together. Every now and then she’d stop and ask me what I thought, or she’d read me something she thought was especially wonderful. I still remember whole chunks of poems, and I can still hear her voice, as clear as day.”

  “Buddy and I used to do that,” Emily said, remembering. Her throat closed. “I can still hear him, too.”

  “I think he picked that up from Grand,” Lulu said. “She taught like that. And she knew all about you; he must have told her at the lessons. She specifically asked me to bring you to her party. What great memories you must have of your brother and the reading.”

  “No. I mean I really hear him,” Emily said. “From somewhere inside. We talk.”

  Hearing her own words, Emily stopped.

  “I guess it sounds crazy,” she said.

  “No, it sounds wonderful,” Lulu said. “I wish somebody talked to me from inside. I think I would have loved your brother.”

  “Yes,” Emily said. “You would have.”

  But it was just me that he loved, she thought.

  “Oh, here it is,” Lulu said, taking a little notebook with brittle yellow pages from the box. The script on the front, spidery and elegant, read My Mother’s Receipts.

  “My great-grandmother’s favorite recipes,” Lulu said. “Only they called them ‘receipts’ in those days. We’re going to eat like nineteenth-century Lowcountry ladies.”

  School started the next Monday. From the first day of her last year in middle school, Emily was bored and restless. Anxieties simmered, always just under the surface of the days. They were not feelings she had ever had at school—well, except for the boredom—and she did not examine them. She sat in stale air-conditioning and listened to droning lectures or giggling, insinuating talk of sex during lunchtime and between classes, hardly sharing either. School this year did not seem real. She only felt reality flow back in, and life resume, when she was back inside the moat, safe again at Sweetwater.

  On that first Monday after school, she changed into capris and a halter top and went out to the apartment. Lulu wore a long flowered voile skirt and tank top and looked older and more elegant with her shining hair pinned up in a knot at the back of her neck. She picked up a covered dish and a long, thin loaf of French bread.

  “It’s called a baguette,” she told Emily. “It’s really good with most casserole things.”

  “We usually have corn bread or biscuits,” Emily said.

  “Well, give it a try. You might just like it.”

  That night they ate Lulu’s great-grandmother’s brown oyster stew with benné seeds, over grits.

  “Or hominy, as they called it back then,” Lulu smiled.

  The exclamations of pleasure from Walter and Jenny and even the twins could be read on her face.

  “We can get you even better oysters than these,” Walt Junior said. “There are beds of them all up and down Sweetwater Creek. Or you can get them yourself. It’s cool. Emily knows how to pick and shuck oysters.”

  “We’ll do that next time,” Lulu said. “I hadn’t even thought of that. Imagine—our own oysters.”

  Emily looked around the table to see who had caught the “our.” Walter and the boys beamed. Jenny Raiford smiled, a strange, remote little smile. It made Emily uneasy. Usually her aunt’s smile crinkled her eyes and lit her face.

  On Tuesday, Lulu brought a shrimp pie. She and Emily had worked together on it in the tiny kitchen. Even though there was not much space, Lulu’s mother had equipped it with handsome, matte-black cookware and an array of implements that Emily had never seen in Cleta’s kitchen.

  “Oyster forks,” Lulu explained. “And these are asparagus tongs. And grape shears. Mother was just showing off. Nobody uses that stuff anymore except maybe at a real formal banquet. And I haven’t been to one of those in years.”

  On Wednesday, the Parmenters exclaimed over shrimp pilau, pronounced, Lulu said, “purloo.”

  On Thursday, there were Aunt Maudie’s scalloped oysters. This time the oysters came from an overhanging bank just down from the dolphin slide on the creek. Emily had showed Lulu how to harvest and shuck them, and they had done it together in the little kitchen.

  “I think Aunt Maudie was an ex-slave,” Lulu said. “I don’t remember her, of course, but Grand remembers when her mother had some ex-slaves in the house.”

  On Friday they brought fresh pompano stuffed with just-caught Bowen’s Island shrimp. That night, after seconds and praise and groans of contentment, Lulu asked Jenny Raiford if she might cook some of the meals in the big kitchen in the house.

  “Emily and I bump into each other,” she said. “And of course we’ll clean up afterward. Mrs. Raiford can go most evenings without even seeing the inside of that kitchen.”

  Aunt Jenny smiled the strange smile and inclined her head, yes. For the last few evenings she had said very little. Emily did not note her silence directly, but somewhere inside her was a void where her aunt’s light, laughing voice had been.

  The first night in the big kitchen she produced creamed sweetbreads, which everyone loved until she told them the provenance of the dish. There were gasps and eye-rollings from Walter and the boys, but they were expected caricatures, Emily knew. By now she thought that the three Parmenter males would happily eat hyena offal if Lulu prepared it.

  For Sunday dinner, at midday, there was Country Captain over hominy.

  “I remember my mother making this,” Walter said, “but I hadn’t thought about it for years. Yours is much better than hers.”

  “And it’s a great way to get rid of a stringy old rooster if you have one,” Lulu said. The table dissolved in laughter. The plantation kept no chickens, and Emily was fairly sure you could not buy roosters at a grocery store. Later, Lulu told her it was a capon, male, but not at all the same thing as a rooster.

  “But with a little of the same strong flavor,” she said. “The fruit and spices would overpower anything else.”

  After a pickup supper that evening, Walter got up from his chair and went to stand behind Jenny Raiford, and said with a smile, “Well, you’ve put Jenny out of a job. Tell them, Jenny.”

  She smiled at them. In the candlelight she was suddenly as beautiful as a madonna. Emily remembered that Buddy had said she had a natural elegance.

  “I’ve been offered a job at Saint Francis Hospital in Charleston,” she said. “And I’ve accepted it. It’s in the public relations office and the pay is really good. I’d have enough to travel like I’ve wanted to, and to maybe one day buy a little house. A friend from college has asked me to share her house in West Ashley, and since we’ve always gotten along wonderfully, I think that’s what I’ll do.”

  She fell silent. The table was silent, too. Emily stared at her. For just a moment, the bridge crumbled and the moat ran dry. She heard in her head the companionable talk between Jenny and Cleta in the kitchen, Jenny and Walter’s laughter floating up the stairs into her bedroom at night. She looked at Jenny Raiford’s silver candlesticks gleaming on the table, and felt again her aunt’s arms firmly around her on the day she had gotten her first period and had thought she was dying. For a moment the world went black and howled. Jenny Raiford had always b
een a buffer between her and her father.

  Jenny looked around the table, still smiling. “You really don’t need me now,” she said. “You girls are both grown-up and doing a fine job of looking after things, and Cleta will come in the mornings just like she always has to straighten up and get lunch, and her niece will come in after dinner and wash up. It’s all I could have wanted, a really good job and finally getting to travel, and seeing Emily so happy and busy. Everybody’s happy, now, it seems to me. We owe Lulu a lot.”

  Lulu bent her head, accepting the words, but she was not smiling. Emily looked at her, seated as always on her father’s left. She was frowning, a small, puzzled frown.

  “I’ll miss you,” Emily said, throat and nose beginning to burn. “I really will.”

  Behind Jenny’s chair, Walter squeezed her slim shoulders.

  “Well, for a long time we surely couldn’t have done without her,” he said. “She deserves her own life now. We’ll be just fine.”

  For a moment Jenny Raiford’s eyes closed, and then they opened and she was smiling around the table once more. In a burst of clarity, Emily read behind her aunt’s closed eyes. She looked up at her father. His face in the candlelight was suddenly younger, warm and softened with a tenderness Emily had never seen, really quite beautiful. She saw, in a sort of swift epiphany, how he must have looked when he met her mother, saw with astonishment that he was a man a woman could love.

  “We’re going to be just fine,” he repeated. His eyes were on Lulu, who looked down at her plate. The burning in Emily’s throat grew into a lump she could scarcely swallow around.

  Oddly, she and Lulu did not discuss her aunt’s leaving when they got back to the apartment.

  “Back to school for you and back to work for me,” Lulu said, and they both simply got into bed and Lulu turned off the light. But it was a long time before Emily slept.

  When she got home from school the next afternoon, Jenny Raiford was gone. There was no one in the big, dim house, and the silence echoed louder than shouting would have done. Emily went up to her hot, closed room to get another armful of clothes to move out to Lulu’s. Beside her, Elvis whined.