Sweetwater Creek
Page 26
“It’s very nice,” she said. “Very Mediterranean, very…ascetic. When your father said you were going to live over a barn my heart sank, and when your mother left leading a caravan of chic, I feared the worst. But this is…very like you. I’ll like remembering you here.”
“Well, I hope it’s not the last time you visit,” Lulu said, pouring out tea, with the same grace she had done at the old lady’s party.
“It probably will be,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “You know how I dislike social visits. But as you will not visit me or answer phone calls, I had little choice. Really, Lulu. Your mother says you’re not talking to her, either, nor to your father. She’s driving me crazy with it: ‘What about Thanksgiving? Or Christmas? What about the Season? What will I tell people?’
“Tell them she’s become a novitiate at a convent, I told her. Or that she’s contracted Hansen’s disease and is in need of seclusion. Maybelle has no idea on earth what Hansen’s disease is, but you’d think I’d suggested she tell people you have gonorrhea.”
“What is it?” Emily said, fascinated.
“Leprosy. I can’t think people really get it anymore. But lepers used to hide away because it disfigured them so. Anyway, Lulu, I told her I’d find out if anything was wrong, just to get her out of my hair—and here I am. So you may as well level, toots. I won’t tattle on you, and I won’t nag you anymore, but I do have to know if anything is wrong. Surely you can see that.”
Lulu was silent a long time, stirring her tea but not tasting it. She looked, not at her grandmother, but into middle distance. Finally she sighed and put the teacup down.
“I should have called. I’m sorry,” she said. “There really isn’t anything wrong. Just the opposite, in fact. I’m just so happy to be here, Grand. The dogs, and the marshes and the river and the woods, and music, and reading, and Emily—it’s been so long since I could just…be. I guess I felt that calling home would be to…I don’t know, invoke that awful chaos I was in when I left school. I couldn’t handle that now, Grand. I couldn’t take the holidays at home; I couldn’t take Mother right now. You know she’d have me out at all those parties before I could say boo, and I just cannot do it. The Season can wait. God knows there’s always another one. Maybe I’ll think about it after New Year’s….”
“I don’t blame you about the accursed Season, or about your mother, either, though to be fair she isn’t trying to be a butt. It just comes naturally. She has lived all her life in the shadow of the goddamned Seasons, and the thought that you might do her out of one—well, I’m being too harsh. She does love you, and your father does, too. They’re terribly proud of you.
“But I’m worried too. It’s almost as if you’re hiding out here. I wish I knew from what. I miss you. I need at least to talk to you every now and then. If something is wrong I can help, you know; don’t forget that. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll keep your mother off your back if you’ll keep in touch. Try to sort yourself out, Lulu. You have to come home sometime.”
After the old lady had kissed them both and been driven away, Lulu and Emily sat silently in the apartment, watching dusk put blue fingers across the lawn.
Lulu spoke first. Emily did not think she had ever heard such desolation in a voice.
“Grand’s right, of course,” she said dully. “I have to go home sometime. I can’t just stay here forever.”
“Maybe you ought to tell her, you know, about all that stuff,” Emily said. “You know she wouldn’t judge you. She probably could help, like she said.”
“No,” Lulu said fiercely. “There’s got to be one person who thinks I’m perfect. I need that. And I’m not sure she’d believe me, anyway. I tried to tell Mother and Daddy that I’m an addict, that I have to stay away from any place there’s drinking. Mother said I was just tired and that I’d be fine as soon as I had some rest. I can’t be in my family, and I sure can’t worm my way into yours.”
“Why not?” Emily said, tasting tears. “You can be in our family. You already are.”
“Because it really isn’t my world,” Lulu said. “I’ve just been pretending that it was. I’d give anything to switch, but…I can’t. People can’t. If I stay here very long I’ll end up hurting somebody. I always do. I’ve already hurt Jenny….”
“No, you haven’t! Daddy says she’s happy as a lark, you heard him. Lulu, please at least stay through Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s. I can’t do those by myself anymore. I really can’t. And besides, New Year’s Day is my birthday.”
Lulu looked up at her, and smiled slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “Not until then.”
Emily would always remember the long, honeyed slide of that autumn into winter. If there had been Lowcountry falls as dreaming-perfect as this one, they had not occurred in her lifetime. Even the adults seemed to notice.
“Nicest fall I can remember,” Walter said at dinner on an October night when the moon rode high like a white galleon over the river and the stars bloomed huge and hung low.
Each day was so perfect that it seemed there could never be another one, and then there was. The great seas of spartina sweeping away to the line of dark trees at the horizon, ordinarily the color of an old lion’s hide, were still as green in the beneficent sun as the little emerald lizards of the Lowcountry. They rippled gently in the small tidal winds off the sea, smelling of warm salt and sea grapes and flowers from unknown faraway shores. The skies were a tender, cloudless blue, almost indigo at noon, and the small citizens of the marsh and river and creek lingered, splashing and swishing and chirping and rustling. None seemed in a hurry to winter down. The creek banks and lowlying branches of the live oaks were festooned with big, drowsy snakes and turtles; whitetails whisked in the far-off hummocks, wood ibises and wood storks and ospreys and an occasional eagle circled lazily, riding the warm thermals. Only the dolphins were gone, cleaving more firmly to their internal imperative than the lure of the still-rich creek water.
“What do they know?” Lulu said once, on a lazy afternoon with Emily and Elvis and apples and cheese beside Sweetwater Creek.
“Maybe they’re just dumb,” Emily said, poking a horribly snoring Elvis with her bare toe. He started up and looked reproachfully at her, then settled back down into sleep.
“They’re the smartest things with fins I ever saw,” Lulu said. “They know something we don’t.”
Both Walter and Cleta endorsed this theory.
“Last time I saw weather like this was the fall right after Hugo,” Walter said. “Thank God we’re past the hurricane season.”
“This weather mean a bad winter coming,” Cleta said ominously on one of the few mornings Emily saw her at the big house. “Tricks all the critters and the flowers into staying late and then whups ’em with black ice. I seen it before.”
But to Emily, drunk on sweet air and sun, the autumn was simply magical. Within the moat, Sweetwater seemed to dream under a spell.
Even crossing the moat was easier in this weather, almost heady. To charge across it and out into the green world in the red BMW was to start out on crusades, harness jingling with gold and silver, pennons flying, still untattered. Two or three times a week Lulu took Elvis and her for sweeps across the marsh country, bouncing along pitted hardtop and dirt roads that were often empty of other traffic, going nowhere except where the road led them. They would come home around dusk, and only when they crossed the drawbridge back to Sweetwater did Emily realize that she had, ever so slightly, been clenching her muscles.
Toward the end of October Lulu took Emily into Charleston proper. Emily was only able to do this if Lulu put the top up. They rattled over the cobbles and bricks of the old neighborhoods south of Broad, and Emily could look up at the narrow, beautiful old single houses lining the streets, the colors of soft heat, without the hairs on her arms prickling with danger. Lulu knew all of them. She would tell Emily stories of the family that lived in this house or that, would point out where she had played in walled gardens and gone to ki
ndergarten and gone to her first cotillion, and received her first kiss.
“Boy, did that start something,” she said ruefully. “And to think it was only fat, freckled Austin Cavanaugh, when we were playing spin the bottle.”
Sometimes she tapped the horn and waved to people on the street, and they would stare and then wave back. Emily, scrunching down as far as she could into the leather seat, saw surprise and speculation bloom on their faces.
“Why do you honk at every single soul we pass?” she said pettishly. “They stare at us like we’re ghosts or something.”
“Well, I’m kin to most of them,” Lulu said lazily. “And then I like to kind of show the flag every now and then, let everybody know I’m still alive and well. They’ll tell Mother they saw me and I looked well, and that’ll keep her off my back for another week or so.”
“They’ll wonder who I am,” Emily said.
“Not when you’re hunched down there on the floor, they won’t. They can’t see you,” Lulu grinned. “But they’ll wonder whose absolutely gorgeous dog that is with me, and sooner or later they’ll be out at the farm wanting dogs of their own. These are not just idle trips, Emmybelle. They’re PR.”
On one of these excursions Lulu took Emily down King Street. For hours they wandered, Elvis heeling perfectly, staring into one fabled shop after another. All the shops seemed alike to Emily, gold and silver and thin, translucent porcelains gleaming in cavelike gloom. And except for the tourists, with their cameras and guidebooks and fatigue-dulled stares, all the people on the street looked like Lulu. It was a fairy-tale street. Emily thought she would never walk down it again. It intimidated at every turn.
Lulu dragged Emily into one of the small, dark shops, where rich fabrics glowed and fabulous shoes lined the walls and cases of jewelry smote the eye, and introduced her to a tall, thin woman who looked to Emily like an elegant wood stork.
“Helen, this is my friend Emily Parmenter,” Lulu said. “Emily, Helen Mills. She’s been keeping the Foxworth women glamorous for years. Helen, I want to get an evening dress for Emily, something she’ll wear for years and still look elegant.”
The stork’s appraising eyes measured Emily, and she smiled.
“I think we can find something,” she said. “She isn’t very tall, but we can camouflage that. And her coloring is lovely. Let me see.”
She disappeared into the back of the cave and came out with an armful of Arabian Nights formalwear. She hung them in a curtained dressing cubicle and said, “Try them on, dear, and let’s see which works best for you.”
Emily started to back away, but a level stare from Lulu stopped her. Meekly she slunk into the cubicle and wriggled into dress after dress. All were exquisite, as formidable as medieval armor. In the mirror Emily resembled no one she had ever seen in any of them.
Eventually they left the shop with a silky hanging bag holding a moss-green velvet sheath with long sleeves and a low-cut back. It fit Emily almost perfectly except for the length, and transformed her into one of the women she had imagined she would see at old Mrs. Foxworth’s party. She disliked the dress; it had been Lulu’s choice.
“Where on earth will I ever wear it?” she groused. “To a dog show? To the vet’s? While I birth a litter of puppies?”
“You’ll wear it,” Lulu said comfortably. “A dress like this will create its own occasions. Don’t scowl so, Emily. You won’t have to buy another party dress for years.”
On still another afternoon they drove down yet another street lined with live oaks and palmettos and tall old dowager houses, and Lulu slowed and stopped before the largest of them. It was massive and beautiful, with slender columns. It sat amid smaller but equally graceful outbuildings, like a mother hen with chicks. The faultless green lawn was encircled with a handsome wrought-iron fence, and through it and the great double gates Emily could see young women, all of whom looked like younger Lulus, walking on the lawn or the paths, laughing, calling to one another. It was a scene out of a Victorian girls’ storybook.
“Charlotte Hall,” Lulu said, smiling. “Lord, how it brings back memories. I know every inch of that house and those buildings and that lawn. Look, see that little house made entirely of shells? Only seniors are allowed to go into it. And further on there’s a stone den the first owner made for his pet bear. I can still smell the chalk and hear the teachers droning on in that sweet way Charleston teachers have. I bet I still know most of them. Listen, let’s go in for a minute. I can give you a quick tour and introduce you to some of the faculty, and you can see for yourself that there are no torture dungeons. You might even like it.”
“If you try to make me go in there I’ll jump out of this car and hitchhike home,” Emily hissed, her words trembling. “I will. I mean it, Lulu.”
“Okay,” Lulu said, smiling at her. “We’ll save it for another time. But we’re going to do it sooner or later, so be warned.”
Emily was silent. All the way home the world outside the moat howled once more with danger. The very blue air throbbed with it. She kept her eyes on the ribbon of road unwinding beneath the little car. Only when they turned off the blacktop onto the dirt road that led to Sweetwater did she take a deep breath and feel her heart slow. Within the moat the dying day turned once more to gold.
Just before Thanksgiving Lulu’s father came to Sweetwater. He came in one of the shining, clifflike SUVs with Maybud written on the door in a graceful script, and there were four other men with him. They all looked alike to Emily: heavy-shouldered, tanned, slow of speech, indolent of movement. Emily would have known they were plantation owners just like Rhett Foxworth if she had met them in a bazaar in Algiers. They commanded the air around them.
Walter had told them the night before that “some people were coming to look at the dogs,” and that he would appreciate it if Lulu and Emily would meet them.
“And maybe bring some of those little seed things you make, Lulu. I’ll get Cleta to leave us some iced tea. Looking at dogs is thirsty work.”
If Emily had not been lulled by the afternoon sun on the creek and a long warm shower, she might have noticed that her father was wearing the smug, full-cheeked look he got when he thought he had scored a considerable coup. But she and Lulu were talking together, walking up the driveway from the barn, and did not look up until they were almost even with the SUV.
“Oh, shit,” Lulu whispered. “It’s Daddy. Oh, how could Walter? Now I’m going to get the whole nine yards about coming home and I just do not think I can stand it.”
But after hugging her hard and nodding genially to Emily, Rhett Foxworth said only, “I’ve been telling these characters about Sweetwater Boykins ever since I brought mine home, and finally they got so tired of me that they wanted to come see for themselves. And when I told them that my girl and her friend Emily trained each and every one of them, they simply didn’t believe me. So I’m going to show them.”
He introduced the men around, and they all smiled and nodded, and then Walter said, “I hope it won’t be too much trouble for you girls to put a few of the dogs through their paces. Start with the new puppies and work up. After that the boys and I will take everybody out to the river and show them the gun work and the retrievals. And then we’ll come have some iced tea.”
There was no way to refuse, so for the next hour Emily and Lulu showed the youngest Boykins in the puppy ring. The youngsters were faultless, and the men nodded and murmured among themselves. But it was Elvis, sitting sentinel at the gate to the ring, who elicited the most comment. It had been too late to shut him up in the barn, and so Emily had looked levelly at her father when Elvis trotted into the ring, and he looked back at her, and, finally, nodded.
“Goddamned beautiful dog,” the men said, “and if he can hunt like he looks, you can put me down for five of the next litter.”
“He doesn’t hunt,” Walter said. “We’re saving him for breeding stock. But he’s got the same bloodlines as our best. Learns faster than any dog I’ve ever seen.”
Emily blushed and dropped her head.
When the men went with Walter out to the river to watch the older dogs perform, Lulu’s father stayed behind. Walter had urged him to join them, but he had said, “You’d just be preaching to the choir, Parmenter. I think I’ll stay and have a chat with my prodigal daughter. I haven’t seen her since summer.”
So Walter and the plantation owners headed out toward the flat training field beside the river, and Rhett Foxworth went over to sit beside Lulu, who was hunkered down on the bottom step up to the porch.
“Emily, get us some of that iced tea, will you?” she said without raising her head, and Emily went swiftly into the dim kitchen, where she put her cheek to the open window out onto the porch and listened shamelessly. Her heart beat strongly. All-powerful Emily, protector, was back. She would let nothing frighten or harm Lulu, not even her father.
But as it turned out, her services were not needed.
“Well, can you run a kennel yet?” Rhett Foxworth said to his daughter, one arm draped loosely around her shoulder.
“Just about,” Lulu said almost inaudibly, looking sidewise up at him. She looked to Emily to be suddenly shriveled, as frail as her grandmother, her essential fires out.
“I’ll bet you could,” he said. “Those dogs are nothing short of phenomenal, and the way you work with them is really nice to see. I never knew you had a gift for dogs.”
“Neither did I,” Lulu said. “But since I’ve been out here I’ve realized that there’s nothing I’d rather do than what I’m doing now.”