Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

“No reason why you should,” her father said. “Lots of Lowcountry women have kennels and train their own dogs. Almost every other wife I know does it to one extent or another. It’s a nice accomplishment; beats bridge and garden clubs all to hell. This is as good a way as any to learn the ropes. But listen, baby, you’ve got to help me out. I need some way to calm your mother down. She’s almost crazy to get you home. She’s pushing me to find out if you’re coming for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Your grandmother is pretty good at shutting her up, but all your friends are asking, too. Your mother says everybody thinks you’re pregnant.”

  Lulu laughed, a laugh rich with relief.

  “Farthest thing from it, Daddy,” she said. “But I just can’t come home yet. I simply cannot do those parties, and they really need me here. I want to stay a little while longer. The new puppies will be finished right after New Year’s. I’ll see then. There’s always next year for the Season. They go on into eternity.”

  Her father laughed.

  “Don’t they though? Well, I can take her over to Yemassee in South Georgia for Beau Troutman’s big hunt at Thanksgiving. Everybody from Pawley’s to Savannah will be there. She’s always wanted to go. And I guess I could take her to St. Thomas or Anguilla or somewhere for Christmas. I’d still save a bundle over what I’d spend for launching you. But you need to call her, Lulu. I can tell her how well you’re doing out here, but she still needs to hear for herself.”

  “I will, Daddy, I promise,” Lulu said. Emily did not think she would.

  Walter and the men came back from the field, talking and laughing. Even at her distance, Emily could see that her father was elated, almost flying. He slapped one and then another of the planters on the back, talking nonstop.

  “All in all, they ordered sixteen puppies,” he exulted at dinner that night. “And they’ll tell the whole Lowcountry, and two or three of them said they’d like to come hunt our land and use the dogs. It would be the chance of a lifetime for us. We’re going to have our own Christmas hunt, just like the big boys do. We’ll invite everybody. We’ve got the contacts now.”

  Emily winced. She knew that by contacts he meant that Lulu Foxworth was in his house. He seemed to her in that moment like a child who has finally gotten a clear sense of himself, even if it is an overblown one.

  Emily looked obliquely over at Lulu, expecting to see her own pain and dismay on Lulu’s face. But Lulu was smiling at Walter over the candles. Her face was serene.

  “I’ll be happy to be your hostess, if you’ll have me,” she said.

  Walter laughed joyously.

  “Let the games begin,” he said.

  Walking back to the barn with Lulu after dinner, Emily said despairingly, “Nobody will come. They have their own hunts. They’ve never invited him. Why would they come to his?”

  Lulu smiled at her. In the eerie, shadowless glow of the sodium lights her face looked exalted, archaic, pagan. Diana the Huntress by Dalí.

  “They’ll come,” she said.

  17

  AND THEY DID. On New Year’s Eve, just at dusk, the big SUVs began to rattle down the dirt road and between the gateposts into Sweetwater’s circular driveway. Lulu and Emily and the twins had lined the long drive with luminarias in paper bags—nothing fancy, Lulu had said—and set outdoor torches around the circle in front of the house. Votives lit the steps up to the porch. Behind the long windows, massed candles flickered.

  The tender fall had slid into a soft early winter, often silver-shrouded with mist from the river and creek. There was mist this night, and all of the lights wore opalescent halos. Just before their guests were due to arrive, Emily and Elvis had slipped out to the end of the dirt road and looked back at the house. Emily caught her breath. House and drive seemed to float in a nimbus of soft white light, shimmering slightly in the moving mist. It was a sight out of an old spell, lovelier in its diffused radiance than Lulu’s blazing plantation had been the night of her grandmother’s party. That had been, simply, glorious. This was, Emily thought, mysterious, almost holy. It made her want to kneel in the mist. She smiled to herself. She would never tell anyone how she felt; she could imagine what her father would say, and the boys. Well, maybe she would tell Lulu. Or maybe she would keep this vision of Sweetwater as her own, something to measure it against forever after.

  Far down the dirt road she heard the crunch of the first vehicles, and picked up her skirts and ran back to the house. When their guests arrived they were met on the steps by Walter Parmenter in a new tuxedo, with Emily on one side in the long green velvet dress, and Lulu on the other, in simple floor-length black velvet and her great-grandmother’s pearls. Elvis sat at grave coppery attention beside Emily. Walter was stiff and awkward, and Emily was tongue-tied, but Lulu was far from speechless. These were her family’s lifelong friends. She welcomed them as such, with smiles and murmured greetings and little cheek kisses.

  This night had begun just after Thanksgiving. That day had been a quiet one; Jenny Raiford had called to say that she and her new friend had tickets to the Clemson–South Carolina game and she was afraid she would have to miss Thanksgiving, but would make it up at Christmas. For the first time in Emily’s memory, Cleta did not come to start the feast. With just the five of them, Walter had said that she might have the whole day with her family. Emily and Lulu could manage. And they had. They had put a fat wild turkey in to brine in a deep feed bucket the night before, a strange and suspect ritual to Emily. She had wrinkled her nose.

  “Trust me,” Lulu said. “It’ll be the best turkey you ever had.”

  And it was. The imperial bird was brought out on the big Haviland platter in its glistening brown glory, surrounded with little crabapples and kumquats and huge purple grapes. Oyster-and-pecan dressing steamed in a separate pan. Yams were not paved with gluey marshmallow, but whipped with raisins and nuts and sherry. Dessert was a regal Lady Baltimore cake that Lulu had spent an entire afternoon assembling. It was, she said, the Maybud cook’s receipt. She could not imagine how old it was.

  “All of it’s out of Grand’s receipt book,” she said when the compliments began to flow. “A really old Charleston plantation Christmas, except for the brined turkey. Emily did half of it.”

  Two days after the holiday, Walter sat down to dinner with a list on a sheet of notebook paper.

  “The hunt’s all planned,” he said. “The boys and I will sleep in the bunkhouse and there’ll be enough rooms for everybody if some of them double up. A venison supper cooked by Cleta and her sister and niece. The band from Bowen’s Island, and a hunt breakfast catered by the best barbecue place on the island. Then hunting all New Year’s Day, and supper. Everybody will leave after breakfast the next day.”

  He looked around the table, beaming. Emily dropped her head in mortification. A band from Bowen’s Island? Aristocratic planters doubling up in big, sagging beds like 10-year-olds at a sleepover or tossing on cots? Barbecue for breakfast?

  She did not lift her head until she heard Lulu’s voice, pleasant and matter-of-fact.

  “Let us take over,” she said. “You have enough to do getting the fields and the pastures in shape, and the dogs. Somebody will have to clean out the barn, in case anybody wants to bring their own dogs. The house needs some spiffing up. Emily and I will do the rest.”

  For the next three days, after finishing with the dogs and before cooking dinner, Lulu spent an hour or so on the telephone, with whom Emily never knew. She wrote invitations on thick ivory vellum notes she had brought with her, and mailed them. Within two days almost everyone had accepted.

  “Gentlemen, start your engines,” Walter crowed, with such exuberance that Emily had to grin, even though she did not understand the allusion.

  The long march up to New Year’s Eve began in earnest. Walter declared a moratorium on training until after the holidays, and Lulu and GW and, in the afternoons, Emily and the twins, put Lulu’s battle plan into action. Emily had grave doubts about it; it was simple in the extreme, even spar
tan. Nothing about it could compete with the celebratory dress their guests’ plantations would wear.

  “Of course we can’t compete with all that; we shouldn’t try,” Lulu said. “This house has its own personality, and it’s just as valid and beautiful as any on the river or the creek. Even its bare bones are wonderful. It’s one of the oldest plantation houses around Charleston, and those earliest ones weren’t ornate and ostentatious. They were just what this one is—simple, functional, close to the woods and the river. In its own way it’s a lot more distinguished than the later ones. And it has some wonderful touches that I’ve only seen in books; that beautiful old gougework in the dining room and library mantels, and that plain, perfect early Georgian staircase in the foyer. The open wraparound porch and the brick pilings under the house—and those are slave-made bricks, I guarantee you—and the thin, plain columns and the tin roof are textbook early river plantation. For decorations we should use what the earliest planters would have, greens from the woods, moss, shells, berries. It will be just as beautiful in its own way as any of the later, fancier ones, you just wait and see. Nobody will have seen anything like it.”

  And under her direction, the work began.

  “We’re going to put people in the bunkhouse to sleep,” she said. “It’s what bunkhouses are for. Trust me. Everyone will love it.”

  And the bunkhouse was turned out and scrubbed and polished and its walls newly stippled with creamy stucco, and the two great boarded-up fireplaces at either end were cleaned and readied, their brasses polished until they gave off their own rich light. The two big moribund communal baths were painted and retiled and their bulbous fixtures renewed. The sloping concrete floors were softened here and there with plushy sheepskin rugs, from where, no one asked. Every day a Maybud SUV appeared with Leland at the wheel, bearing another load of plunder.

  “How on earth did you get your mother to lend you all this stuff?” Emily asked one day in early December, watching Leland and some of the Maybud hands wrestling an enormous, carved pine armoire out of the van. It wore a patina of centuries.

  “Mother doesn’t know about it,” Lulu said, directing the placement of the armoire in the bunkhouse. “I cut a deal with Daddy. I’d come home, at least for a little while, right after New Year in exchange for borrowing some things from Maybud. Most of it is stuff Mother hasn’t thought of for years, from the attic and the dependencies. She and Daddy have already left for the Caribbean. It’ll be back in place before they get home. This monster will hold linens and blankets and pillows and comforters; you can get away with the simplest kind of beds if the linens are wonderful. This is just the beginning.”

  And it was. Every day another vanful of riches appeared.

  “Everybody will know it’s not our stuff,” Emily said, watching boxes of tissue-swathed table linens and silver being carried into the house. “They’ve probably all seen it at your house.”

  “Who cares?” Lulu grinned. “Just the men are coming, and no man in this crowd ever noticed what he was eating off or sleeping in. They just notice that it’s heavy and shining and old, if they notice it at all. They would, on the other hand, notice paper plates and napkins and Wal-Mart platters, even though they wouldn’t quite know what was wrong.”

  “It’s put-on,” Emily sniffed. “I thought you didn’t like that.”

  “No, it’s not,” Lulu said seriously. “Put-on is when you pretend to be something you’re not so people will think better of you. This is making people comfortable, not pretending Sweetwater is Maybud or any one of those other big old piles. It’s about other people. Put-on is about you.”

  She was, in those last days of the year, as incandescent and quicksilver as Emily had ever seen her. Lulu in the puppy ring or at her father’s table was fine to watch; Lulu moving smoothly among old linens and silver and laughing in joy as Sweetwater began to come alive under her hands was mesmerizing. Emily had almost begun to take her extraordinary looks for granted, but in these still, lowering days before the hunt she seemed to see her again as she had on the first day she had come. Lulu dazzled in the gloom of early winter.

  Emily could see that her father noticed, too. His eyes rested often on Lulu as she moved around the plantation, and sometimes he simply followed her on her appointed rounds, silently and with his hands in his pockets. The twins dropped their after-school rendezvous with their cronies at the Harley place in Hollywood or the Qwik Stop Full Service convenience store in Meggett and came home to place themselves in her service. Only Cleta, watching the glittering provender slowly fill her kitchen and pantry and spill over onto the dining room table, was less than enchanted.

  “Mules dressed up in buggy harness,” she muttered once to Emily as Leland brought in piles of creamy, lavender-smelling damask. “Who gon’ wash and iron all this stuff? Who gon’ serve all them platters and trays? Who gon’ cook enough stuff to fill ’em all up?”

  Lulu, who, with Emily, was sorting napkins and tray cloths in the dining room, said, “Some of our folks from Maybud are going to come out and cook and do the heavy stuff. I promise they won’t get in your way. They’ll do exactly what you want them to do. You don’t even have to stay if you don’t want to. It’ll be a long night.”

  “This my kitchen and I’m stayin’ in it,” Cleta said. “Ain’t nothing leavin’ it for that dining room I don’ say can go.”

  “Fair enough,” Lulu said. “Of course it’s your kitchen.”

  “Huh,” said Cleta. After that, she said little at all.

  Early in December Lulu persuaded Walter to come with them into Charleston for the last fitting of Emily’s dress. “Just to see the Christmas decorations,” she said. “We’ll drive down the Battery and then over to King Street. You don’t even have to get out of the car. Come on. You never go anywhere with us.”

  But, “You all go on without me,” he said on the appointed day. “I’ve got the intermediates starting to the gun.”

  “The intermediates can wait one day,” Lulu said. “Walter, you promised. When else have I ever asked you to do anything?”

  And so they drove, rattling, into Charleston and around the Battery and through the old streets south of Broad, and finally down to King Street. Walter stayed in the truck while Emily was fitted. (“My dear, stunning,” the wood stork said.) After they were done, instead of heading out of Charleston for home, Emily had Walter park and marched him firmly into Ben Silver’s legendary clothing store.

  “They’ve been outfitting Foxworth men forever,” Lulu said, smiling at the discreetly splendid young salesman who came to meet them. He was all over flannel and tattersall, and obviously knew her.

  “Miss Foxworth,” he said. “How can I help you? Little Christmas something for your dad?”

  “No,” Lulu said. “A tuxedo for Mr. Parmenter here, Armitage. Something plain and traditional, but maybe with a tartan cummerbund or something. He’ll wear it mainly in the country.”

  “Of course,” the young man said smoothly. “Would you step this way, sir? We have some nice things from England this year.”

  Walter’s face was flushed red and his nostrils were pinched and white. Emily sidled away. She knew that look.

  But all he said was “Thank you,” and glared once at Lulu, and followed the young man back into the dim, wood-smelling reaches of the store. Lulu and Emily sat down in herringbone armchairs to wait. Another young man brought them tea in thin white cups, and shortbread.

  “You must come here all the time,” Emily said, feeling, in her jeans and barn jacket, like a farmhand in a palace. Lulu, who wore exactly the same clothes, looked just like what she was, a wealthy planter’s daughter in her afternoon casualwear.

  “Mother and I used to come a lot,” she said. “Grand, too. None of the Foxworth men have ever willingly come down to King Street, even to be fitted. The store usually sends somebody out to Maybud and we corner them while he fits them.”

  “Daddy is going to just hate this,” Emily said.

  And
perhaps he did, but when Walter Parmenter walked out of the fitting room in a tuxedo of thin lustrous wool, with a snowy, pleated front shirt and black bow tie and a cummerbund of discreet brick-and-moss plaid, they sat in silence. Then Lulu clapped her hands in mock applause and laughed aloud with glee.

  “You look absolutely fabulous,” she said. “You could be a model for Ralph Lauren, if you weren’t so obviously a dog breeder. Nobody at this hunt is going to come anywhere near comparing to you. Have you looked at yourself?”

  Emily simply stared. Walter Parmenter was transformed by fabric and alchemy into someone she had never seen, an elegant, attenuated man in evening clothes, his blond, silvering hair shining in the overhead light, his thin-featured face thrown into blade-fine half-shadow, his leathery countryman’s tan as smooth and as golden as Lulu’s. He turned to look at them and his eyes were the blue of a noon October sky in the store’s flattering low light. Emily’s breath stopped for a moment in her chest. She knew she was looking at the man young Caroline Carter had seen on a summer day long ago and promptly brought all her guns to bear on capturing him from her sister. For just that moment, she could see why. Beside her, Lulu made a small, happy sound in her throat.

  “Now tell me I was wrong about this,” she said.

  He looked into the mirror for a moment, and then looked back at her almost bashfully.

  “It’s a nice suit,” he said. “But I’m going to be way overdressed. It’s the country, after all.”

  “They’ll all be wearing them,” she said. “For some reason, it’s just what they do on the nights before hunts. The only difference is that their tuxes will be butt-sprung or slick on the elbows, or beginning to turn a little green. After they see you every one of them is going to go out and buy a new one.”

  Walter stood dutifully while a stoop-shouldered older man came to sketch patterns on the tuxedo with chalk. When he came back out of the dressing room in his field clothes, he said to the young salesman, “Will you take a check? I don’t have my cards with me.”