Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “It won’t make any difference. Your ears are all stopped up. When you’re really ready to hear me, you will.”

  “When will that be?” The tears slid down her cheeks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe never. I’ll keep trying, though.”

  Darkness fell like a curtain on the road, and Buddy and the tree and the animals were gone. Emily woke in the dark of her room in the barn, sobbing aloud. Elvis was licking her face.

  “Did you see him?” she whispered.

  “I always do.”

  “Have you been crying?” Lulu said the next morning when she came downstairs to join Emily.

  “No.”

  Late that afternoon they stood before the old cheval glass mirror in Lulu’s room, finishing dressing. Besides the lamps, Lulu had lit candles, and in the wavy speckled old mirror she and Emily both looked like women out of an earlier time, in their long-sleeved velvet dresses, with their hair, copper and blond, piled on their heads. Lulu fastened her grandmother’s pearls around her neck and then turned and studied Emily. She reached into a bureau drawer and took out a little twist of tissue paper and handed it to Emily.

  “I was going to wait until your birthday proper, but you need these tonight,” she said.

  Emily opened the twist. In the folds a pair of earrings lay, green and water-clear stones gleaming in mountings of old rose gold. Emily gasped and looked up at Lulu.

  “Are they…?”

  “Emeralds and diamonds. They were Grand’s grandmother’s. She gave them to me on my eighteenth birthday, but I’ve never worn them and I never will. I hate emeralds.”

  “Why?”

  “I read someplace they were bad luck,” Lulu said. “I don’t need any more of that.”

  “Does that mean I’ll have it?” Emily said, turning her head this way and that to watch the teardrops swing and glitter against her bare neck.

  “Not a chance. Nothing ahead for you but good luck. Anyway, I think they’re only bad luck for blondes. Look at us, will you? Velvet and pearls and emeralds and candlelight. John Singer Sargent might have painted us.”

  Emily hugged Lulu fiercely, feeling her sharp bird’s bones under the velvet, and smelling silky-clean hair and the old-fashioned scent of tuberoses.

  “I’ll wear them always,” she whispered into Lulu’s neck.

  “Not exactly the thing for the puppy ring,” Lulu said, and Emily felt her smile against her cheek. “They look stunning on you, though, as if they had been made for you. Now aren’t you glad I made you get your ears pierced last fall? We’ll have a proper birthday party tomorrow, when everybody’s off on the hunt, with cake and confetti and balloons and dogs—the works. Twelve to thirteen is the biggest step there is.”

  “Why?” Emily said.

  “Because thirteen is when you start to know things.”

  “What things?”

  “Just things. Things about the world and people and yourself. About life. Things you’ll need to know the rest of your life but that nobody will tell a child.”

  “Bad things?”

  “Good and bad. Strange. Wonderful. Scary. Beautiful. Sometimes things you hate but can never un-know. And some things so glorious that only a complex and aware mind can comprehend. Thirteen is when you start getting complicated, Emily.”

  “I don’t know if I want to know them then.”

  “You don’t have any choice. But it all comes gradually. Nobody could stand knowing everything at once.”

  They went down the barn stairs and out into the grassy field around the dog ring. It was still early; an apocalyptic red sun was bloodying the marshes to the west, but in the east, high in the purpling arc of the sky, a great ghost moon hung, waiting to bloom into light.

  “Wolf moon,” Lulu said. “It’ll be cold and clear as crystal in the morning, great for the hunt.”

  In her thin raincoat, Emily shivered. It was not just the stinging cold. Moon of the wolf….

  They were going to the big house early so that Lulu could show Emily where everything for the party was and what to do about it.

  “Why do I need to know that?” Emily had grumped. “You’re going to be there. It’s your party.”

  “No, it’s not,” Lulu said firmly. “It’s your father’s party, and that means it’s yours, too. You’re the lady of the house, Emily, like it or not. And the lady of the house is always the gentleman’s hostess. Always. I can help plan it, but you have to know the entire drill.”

  “Those men know what to do. They go to things like this all the time. They can look after themselves. All those servants of yours know what to do. They can look after everybody. The only people who don’t know are Daddy and me.”

  “Well, after tonight you will,” Lulu said in exasperation. “Emily, if you’re going to be part of this farm’s future, or run it one day, you’re going to be the hostess of Sweetwater. And you won’t be entertaining folks from the VFW and the John’s Island Lanes. This farm is going to be on another map entirely after tonight. Knowing how to run it gracefully goes with the territory.”

  “Did you have to learn all this stuff?”

  “Every bit of it. How do you think I know?”

  Earlier that afternoon they had walked through the bunkhouse. Fires blazed on the great stone hearths and the narrow bunks were deep with drifted featherbeds and old linens. Beside each stood a rough carved chest, and on each one Lulu had put a fat white candle in a hurricane glass and a small vase of holly and ivy. The stone floors were strewn with snowy fleeces, and between the fireplaces the other great pine stood, unadorned and lordly, breathing out the living essence of the woods. At either end of the room, in front of the fireplaces, tables had been set up and covered with green cloths, wooden chairs drawn up to them.

  “There’ll be a good bit of poker tonight,” Lulu said.

  Just behind them, narrower tables—sawhorses with planks, Emily thought—had been covered in white. A staggering array of liquors were arranged on them, and silver bowls already full of benné crackers and boiled peanuts. Two impassive black men in white jackets stood easily behind them, talking in low voices.

  “Miss Lulu,” they said when Lulu and Emily entered.

  “Simon,” Lulu said warmly. “Charles. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

  “Glad to do it, Miss Lulu.”

  Before going to the bunkhouse, they had looked briefly into the old stables, scrubbed and warm now, and piled deep with fresh straw, to see the old-fashioned buckboard wagons that had come over that afternoon from Maybud, and the four shining, impassive mules, also trucked over, who would pull the wagons in the morning.

  “Mules?” Emily had looked up at Lulu.

  “For some reason, the winter hunts always go out in mules and wagons with the men in one and the dogs in another. These are the same drivers we use at Maybud, and the same mules. The men will have had coffee and brandy, or neat whiskey, or whatever, and probably ham and biscuits. At noon a wagon will come out with Bloody Marys and a hot lunch. The drivers will set it up and serve it, and in the late afternoon everybody and the dogs will come back with the ducks, and while the men are cleaning up and changing, our men will clean and dress the ducks and have them ready in case anybody wants one cooked up at the last minute.”

  “My lord, what a to-do over a bunch of ducks,” Emily said, inhaling the sweet smell of wood shavings and mule hide.

  “Going to sell a lot of Boykins,” Lulu said.

  In the house, Lulu walked Emily around. Candles glowed everywhere; fires snickered behind their screens, and stair rails and mantels and sideboards were festooned with garlands of fresh greenery. The great tree in the foyer looked just as Lulu had said it would, a captured forest giant in the high-ceilinged gloom. They had made wreaths for every window, centered with a white taper, and on the front door they hung a great wreath of pine and cedar, studded with shells and moss and holly. The porch lights were already lit, so the wreath blazed out into the gathering darkness in a penumbra
of light. In the library, small living holly trees in pots stood about the fireplace, and smilax and magnolia leaves gleamed. Small tables covered with white damask were scattered about in front of the old sofa, along with a phalanx of borrowed gilt Maybud chairs.

  “People will probably bring their plates in here to eat,” Lulu said. “There are too many to seat, and a buffet the night before a hunt is traditional, anyway.”

  In the dining room, the old oval table had been draped with silky, thin white damask and set with ornate silver platters and tureens and flatware. More white candles gleamed in tall silver candelabra, and a towering, beautiful old pierced silver bowl on a pedestal sat in the middle, heaped with holly and pomegranates and trailing ivy. An épergne, Lulu said. It had come over with the Lords Proprietors too. Emily thought it looked it.

  On the sideboard a massive silver service and translucent porcelain cups and saucers rested, and cloudy old decanters of brandies and liqueurs. A full bar stood in the foyer, just to one side of the tree, snowy white and groaning under bottles of wine and liquor. Candles flickered here, too, and holly shone softly, and behind the bar a white-coated Maybud man stood at parade rest, studying the assortment of garnishes set out in small silver bowls.

  “Miss Lulu,” he said.

  “Evening, Peter,” Lulu said. “You look ready for action.

  “Here’s what happens,” Lulu said after they had inspected the foyer and library and dining room.

  “You’ll stand beside your father at the door and greet everybody as they come in. I’ll introduce you, and you repeat their names and smile and say you’re glad they could come. The twins will take their coats and their overnight things and put them out in the bunkhouse, and your father will tell them to help themselves at the bar and join him in the library. After everybody’s got a drink and is settled in, you walk through and ask if everybody has everything they need, or if you can get something for them. Smiling, Emily. Then you excuse yourself and go into the kitchen and get everything in there going.”

  Emily was panting with terror.

  “You’re not going to make me do all that by myself,” she choked.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, of course not,” Lulu said. “But you’d better pay attention, because next time you will have to do it by yourself. And do it right. Now for the kitchen.”

  The cavernous kitchen blazed with light and steamed with wonderful smells. More worktables had been brought in, and on them, and on the big old oak center table, pots and dishes and trays of food—Emily recognized little broiled quail, and tenderloin of beef and venison, and a plate of rosy sliced duck breast—stood ready to be brought out into the dining room or put into the great, wheezing oven. Pots on the stove simmered, and the smell of shrimp and oysters and sherry and herbs and baking bread made Emily’s mouth water, dry with fright though it was. Aproned black women from Maybud whisked back and forth, doing unfathomable things to anonymous dishes, chattering and laughing among themselves. In the center of it all, like a great dark mountain, Cleta loomed, unaccustomedly aproned in white and holding a whisk like a baton. She did not speak, but her eyes followed the Maybud workers’ every move and her lips were pursed with disapproval.

  Emily ran to her and hugged her, grateful for a familiar island in this sea of chaos, and Cleta hugged her back and then held her off and looked at her. Her face softened into a smile.

  “Look at you, Emily,” she said. “Look right out of Gone With the Wind, you do. Is those new earrings?”

  “They’re emeralds,” Emily said proudly. “Lulu gave them to me for my birthday.”

  “Huh,” Cleta said.

  Lulu showed Emily how to inspect each dish as it was put into its service piece and then set on the table in the dining room. Emily should, the first few times she did this, keep a small list and check off the steps one by one.

  “You don’t,” Emily pouted.

  “I did.”

  On the threshold of the kitchen, Elvis sat tranquilly in his new plaid collar, eyes following every move.

  “He’s got his own list,” Lulu said.

  “When the table is laid and the hot dishes ready in their chafing dishes, you check the table once more for serving pieces and napkins and sauces and gravy boats and condiments, and then thank the kitchen staff and go to the library door and say, ‘I believe we’re ready for dinner, Daddy, if you’ll tell everybody.’ And he will, and they’ll start in to the dining room, and you’re on your way. After that it’s just a matter of working the room, saying hello and refilling plates, if anyone wants them, and passing the dessert tray. I think it’s profiteroles tonight. I remember you liked the ones we had at Grand’s so I asked for them. Then you say, ‘There’s coffee and brandy on the sideboard, and the bar is still open. Please enjoy yourselves and I hope to see you in the morning before the hunt,’ and you can cut out for bed. The kitchen staff does the rest.”

  “Jesus,” Emily said profanely. “It’s worse than the SATs. What about Elvis?”

  “I think we can trust Elvis to pose quietly wherever he can best be seen,” Lulu laughed. “He knows which side his bread is buttered on.”

  A faint, “Here they come” floated back from the far edge of the driveway, where the twins were stationed as outriders. They had flatly refused to wear tuxedos and mingle with the storied planters, so they had been allowed to dress in their good shetland sweaters and wool slacks, which they wore perhaps once every two years, and serve as scouts.

  Inside, in the foyer, Walter and the two girls heard the hail. Walter smoothed the tuxedo coat and took a deep breath, looking white-eyed over at Lulu. Emily tried to breathe through lungs turned suddenly to cement. Lulu smiled at both of them.

  “Here we go,” she said, and opened the front door, and they went out into the clear cold dark of New Year’s Eve to welcome the planters of three counties to Sweetwater.

  19

  AT SEVEN-THIRTY that evening Emily, bearing plates of crabmeat canapés and hot cheese puffs, paused in the doorway to the library and listened to the voice of the house.

  It was not a voice she had heard before. Before tonight, the house had said nothing to her. Now, it spoke so closely and clearly into her ears that it might have been a great, living entity. For the first time, Emily saw that it was. She knew that the way she thought of Sweetwater had changed forever.

  Its voice was almost entirely masculine, and very old. It was woven of the lazy, indistinct talk of men, punctuated by eruptions of raucous laughter; the creaking of wide, waxed old boards under men’s feet; the tinkle of ice against crystal and the tink of silver against silver; the whispered roar of fires; and, as if from a great distance, the excited yips of dogs. It seemed to Emily that the voice had been speaking to her all along, speaking for centuries, even, and she was only just now hearing it. This, she knew without knowing how, was how the house was supposed to sound, and it opened and bloomed under its freedom to speak.

  “I wonder if anybody else hears it,” she thought. “If they do, they don’t let on. I bet Buddy did, though. And Elvis.”

  She looked down at him, sitting at her left heel.

  “Do you hear it?”

  “Of course.”

  Emily smelled the breath of the house, too: rich tobacco, burning applewood, faint exhalations from damp old rugs and wet wool, the somehow old bronze smell of whiskey. And always, a constant undernote, clean and sweet to Emily, the smell of burnished spaniels.

  Her mouth relaxed from the stiff social rictus bidden by Lulu into something softer, of a piece with the voice and breath of the old house: the smile of a daughter of the house. Going into the room with her plates, Emily was, for the first time that night, able to perform her role with ease.

  “Please try the cheese puffs,” she said to one big, tuxedoed man after another. “They’re a specialty of Cleta’s. And we caught the crabs from off our dock. Lulu and I made these this afternoon.”

  And one by one the men took the appetizers and bit into them and nod
ded their heads appreciatively, and smiled at Emily the same easy smiles they bent upon Lulu.

  “You the little girl who trained Rhett Foxworth’s Boykins? He said he’d never seen anything like you. He didn’t say you were so grown-up and pretty, though. Walter, where you been hiding this girl?”

  “She’s my secret weapon,” Walter Parmenter said in a burst of unaccustomed grace, and smiled at Emily. Across the room, handing a fresh drink to a large, red-faced man indistinguishable to Emily from all the others, Lulu smiled too.

  “Well, Missy, your daddy tells me you’ve spent the summer and fall out here learning about spaniels,” the man said to Lulu. “Going to start your own kennel?”

  “There’s nothing I’d love more, Mr. Aiken,” Lulu said.

  “Well, you better get on back into town. Half the swains of Charleston are pining over your absence.”

  “Swains will keep,” Lulu said. “Spaniels won’t.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Meeting Lulu back in the bustling kitchen, Emily let out a deep breath.

  “How am I doing?”

  “Good. Better than good. Didn’t I tell you? I think it’s in your genes.”

  “Well, it must be way back, then,” Emily said, and then stopped. She thought of her beautiful, storied mother and her parties and dinners; she thought of Jenny Raiford’s easy grace at their dinner table. Maybe not so far back after all.

  “Now, that’s the last of the chafing dishes,” Lulu said. “You go in and ask your father to start everybody in to dinner while I do a last-minute check. After that we can go sit in the breakfast room and put our feet up and have a bite. They’ll be occupied for a while.”

  Emily had started for the library when the big front-door knocker thundered. She looked around at Lulu. It was very late for anyone to be arriving.

  “I’ll get it,” Lulu said. “You go on into the library.”

  Emily heard the big front door creak open, and a small silence, and then Lulu said, “Daddy! What on earth are you doing here? I thought you all were still on St. Bart’s. Is Mother with you?”