Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Care to join us?” Yancey Byrd said.

  Emily could not speak and she could not move. Elvis growled and growled. Yancey Byrd reached down and touched himself. “Plenty for everybody,” he said.

  “Emily, get out of here,” Lulu said. Her voice was thin and frail, a sick child’s. Her eyes did not open.

  “GET OUT!” she screamed, when Emily did not move. There was nothing of affection or recognition or even of human life in the scream. Before it died away, Emily was on her feet and running back down the black path.

  “Run faster,” Buddy said in her ear. “Run harder!”

  Emily tried, but her feet were numb with cold and her legs trembled so that it seemed like running in waist-high water, running in one of those run-but-don’t-get-anywhere dreams. She stumbled and fell and got up, and fell again. Behind her, Elvis barked and barked, his herding bark.

  Midway back down the path the numbness wore off and Emily began to cry. Sickness and horror flooded her throat, and grief, and sheer revulsion. It almost doubled her over. She knew, suddenly, that something was coming after her down the path, something bound on consuming her, on doing her mortal harm. It was not Yancey Byrd; Emily heard the thin, lost wails start again from the banks of the dolphin slide and knew that he had what he wanted. But it was somehow of him. It rolled off him like smoke. It was dense and black and filled the world, stinking so of despair and sweat and sickness and fishy sex and utter corruption that she doubled over against the retching. Behind her, the darkness was boiling like smoke, thickening, moving inexorably, like a great autumn fog bank. If it overtook her she would drown in it, bobbling forever like a dead thing sunk to the ocean floor, slowly rotting, corrupted beyond reclamation. Doubled over, she faltered.

  “RUN TO THE LIGHT, EMILY! GO INTO THE LIGHT!” Buddy shouted in her ear. Elvis, running behind her now, nipping at her heels to prod her forward, looked back.

  “Come on!”

  Emily straightened up and saw, ahead, the mouth of the path that opened into the field. Beyond it, light spread like silver, like frost. Taking great, tearing breaths, she began to run again, oblivious of the tearing briars and jutting roots, her legs beginning to find a rhythm, her arms swinging with it. “RUN, EMMY!” Buddy shouted again, sounding farther away now.

  “I’m running,” she said back to him. “Can’t you see that I’m running?”

  “ONE MORE BIG PUSH, EMMY,” he said, and she took a gigantic, dizzying breath and burst out into the light.

  For a moment she stood still at the fringe of the woods, arms clutching her stomach, doubled over, gasping. And then she lifted her head and looked across the field toward the river. In the cold, pouring light of the moon Sweetwater stood black against the sky. A few of its windows still glowed yellow, and smoke came from the chimney that served the library fireplace. Her father. Her father was still awake. Whether he was mourning Lulu or waiting for Emily, it didn’t matter. He was awake.

  It was suddenly vital, imperative, life-or-death that he still be awake when she got home. Behind her, far back down the path, she smelled the black breath still coming on, though more slowly now.

  “You’re not quite there yet, Emmy,” Buddy said. “Run on, now.”

  Straightening up again, she gulped freezing, burning air into her lungs and began to run once more. Elvis ran beside her, pacing her, perfectly silent, a ghost dog.

  Under the huge, indifferent eye of the wolf moon, Emily Parmenter, thirteen years old and knowing things, ran for her life.

  21

  ALL THAT WINTER a great silence lay over Sweetwater. It had heft, mass, weight; enough weight to press Emily deep down into herself. She could hear the sounds of life and the world, but only faintly, as if through water. Buddy was silent. The house did not speak again. Only the dogs were clear. In the afternoons, when she trudged out to begin the puppies’ training, their joyful treble voices washed her heart: “You’re here! You came! Play with us! Teach us to be good dogs!”

  “I’m here,” Elvis said over and over. “I’m here.” He said nothing else, but she asked nothing else of him in those numb, muffled days than that he be there.

  Emily did not know if the others felt the weight of the silence. She could see their lips moving at each other, see doors opening and closing, see dogs being loaded into their kennels in the truck bed, see guns being taken down from the rack to be taken to the river field for gun training. She could see the ghostly blue light from the TV set in the den every night, for her father and the boys had retreated back there quickly afer dinner, as though they had never lingered in candlelight, laughing and captivated, at the dining room table.

  But she did not hear, not really.

  She had to assume that they did hear, for the life of the house went on, much as it had in the time before Lulu. Cleta came mornings as she always had, to get breakfast and tidy up, and her niece Anisha came now to cook dinner and do dishes at night. They all talked to her; she knew that they did, and every now and then she heard a fragment of their speech; “Emily, you lookin’ weedy. Eat your breakfast.” “Emily, did you take the choke chains out to the puppy ring? We need them for the big dogs.” And from her father: “How is school this winter? Is the new litter doing okay? We’ve got four more coming up behind them, if you can handle them.”

  And she would strain and concentrate, and force their words to register in her brain.

  To everything, she smiled widely and said, “Fine.”

  At school she could burrow into her books and not hear the words of her classmates at all, but she saw them through thick air: “Where’s that hot babe in the red beemer? You don’t look half as good now as you did when you were cruising around in that car. She get tired of slumming? Your daddy and brothers put the moves on her?”

  She would smile widely and move on to her next class. At lunch she stayed in her homeroom and ate the sandwiches Cleta had made for her, and read. Reading was real and fully engaging; she drowned herself in it. It was the only thing that was. Buddy had known that.

  Every now and then she would think, “Is this what depression is? Or a nervous breakdown? I don’t feel like either one, but I don’t feel much of anything else, either. I wonder if I should tell anybody? But who would I tell?”

  And then, “Lulu would know…” and there would be a flash of pain so swift and keen and silvery that it only hurt a moment later, as a razor slash would have.

  She could come and go without even noticing that a moat had ever been there, for Sweetwater was in a different country now, and if nothing seemed to particularly threaten, neither did anything particularly comfort. Going out from it was the same as coming home to it, only done at different times in the winter days. But still, after coming home, there were the puppies and Elvis, and their sweet cleanness and puppy silliness still engaged her, if less so than before.

  “I’m back,” she would think at a scramble of small just-released copper Boykins. “You ready to rock and roll?”

  And their frantic joy lifted her up, at least as long as she was with them.

  Elvis was always there.

  Sweetwater was busier than it had ever been. Lulu had been right; the word had spread swiftly after the hunt about Walter Parmenter and his remarkable Boykin spaniels, and orders for pups and training came in from all over the state. People came regularly to Sweetwater to see the paragons, and Emily and Walter and the boys put them through their paces, and the visitors invariably went home leaving orders behind. Many of them brought their own dogs to be started by Emily and brought along by the boys and the two new young trainers Walter had lured away from other South Carolina kennels. Walter was seldom at home; he took the dogs all over for field trials and exhibitions, and the mantel in the den grew crowded with dusty blue ribbons and tarnished silver bowls. Once there was a picture of Walter and a new litter in The State, Walter grinning at the camera and holding an armful of wriggling pups.

  WALTER PARMENTER OF SWEETWATER FARM, WADMALAW ISLAND, AND HIS PRIZE
WINNING BOYKIN SPANIELS, it was captioned.

  Many of the weathered men who came to look at the puppies were from big plantations all over the Lowcountry, and many of them accepted with alacrity Walter’s invitation to hunt at Sweetwater with the farm’s spaniels.

  But none of the planters asked him on their hunts. Everything had changed and yet nothing had. Walter had new trainers, new crates, a new SUV with “Sweetwater” scripted on the side, expanded quarters and a new ring for the older dogs, but he did not have the one thing his heart had thirsted for. If he wondered why, he never said. But Emily could have told him.

  No one among the Lowcountry planters was going to give house room to the man who had lost Rhett Foxworth’s daughter.

  For Lulu did not come back. Not to Sweetwater, and not, apparently, to Maybud or Charleston or Randolph Macon, or anywhere else she might be expected to go. On the morning after the oyster roast, when she still had not appeared, Lulu’s father, getting ready to go back to Maybud, asked Emily, scowling, if she knew where his daughter was.

  “It’s rude as hell,” he fumed. “Not just to me. These guys are her family’s oldest friends. Have you seen her, Emily?”

  Crossing her fingers, Emily said, “Not since last night. I spent the night here, in the house, and she went out to her apartment. I think she might have been with that man from Virginia who came with you, though.”

  Annoyance and indulgence warred on Rhett Foxworth’s bland babyface.

  “Yancey Byrd. I might have known. He was hell-bent on finding her. No telling where those two might have gotten to. Well, I’m not going to worry about her, then, at least not for now. She’s undoubtedly up to no good, but at least we know who she’s up to it with. Maybelle will be thrilled. She’ll be certain they ran off and got married. That would make up for all this flap about missing the goddamned Season. If she does show, send her home. We’ll give her a few days before we start worrying.”

  “You should have started worrying months ago,” Emily thought, grief and revulsion stopping her breath. She did not think the horrifying image of Lulu, flaccid and drunk and naked in the arms of that dark satyr of a man, would ever leave her. It felt burnt into her retinas, like the afterimage of a great red explosion. She thought that she would die before she told anyone about Lulu in that awful moment.

  So she said nothing. After breakfast the planters left in their caravans of Land Rovers and custom Jeeps, scattering compliments and laughter, and Sweetwater was once again still and quiet. It was a quiet that echoed.

  Walter did not mention Lulu to Emily, not then and not for a very long time afterward. He simply said, “You did a good job this weekend, Emily. I’m proud of you,” and vanished out to the field by the river with the older dogs. Watching him walk away across the lawn, Emily saw, not the vibrant golden man of the past few days, but her father again, abstracted as he had always been, emptied of the manic ambition and the strutting glee that had lit him throughout the fall. She wanted to cry for him, and then anger came sweeping in, anger at him for letting Lulu Foxworth become his polestar, anger at Lulu for tossing all of them away for the dark monster. There were things she could have done, Emily thought furiously. She could have left the party and locked herself in her apartment. She could have stayed overnight at the big house with Emily. She could have told her father that she was ill and had to go home.

  In her heart of hearts, Emily knew that Lulu could have done none of those things, that her servitude to the dark man was absolute, and, this time, apt to kill her.

  “I should have told her father,” she thought, in an agony of guilt. “Or Cleta, or somebody. I let this happen to her. I swore I’d take care of her, and I just ran, and let it happen. And I didn’t tell anybody. And I won’t.”

  For a few days she moved in a miasma of guilt so thick and overpowering that she could barely stand under its weight. And then, as if summoned by her pain, white silence came, and she ran into it gratefully. It swallowed the guilt and everything else.

  A few days later Maybelle Foxworth appeared at the farm, Caribbean-tanned and fur-coated and furious. She did not look like an older Lulu now. She looked like a harpy, a fury, a maenad.

  “How could you let this happen?” she stormed at Walter. “She was under your roof! She was your guest! How could you let her just—vanish?”

  Walter did not defend himself.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “She had gotten to be so much a part of the family that it never occurred to me to…watch her all the time. She never saw anybody but us, that I know of. She was with Emily constantly. I never even knew about this Byrd boy until he turned up.”

  Maybelle rounded on Emily.

  “You must have known something!” she shrilled. “You lived with her; you slept downstairs from her, you were with her night and day for nearly seven months. She wouldn’t have just…left without telling you.”

  Emily was silent, but her father spoke up. “Emily knows nothing more than the rest of us,” he said, with an edge of iron in his voice that she had never heard. “If she did, she’d tell you. You might remember that it was you and your husband who asked if Lulu could come here, and said that you’d make sure she was no trouble at all. And she wasn’t. But neither were any of us given any indication that we were expected to watch over her. Didn’t she keep in touch with you? She said that she talked to you almost every day.”

  Emily saw in Maybelle Foxworth’s face that Lulu had done no such thing.

  “If you hear anything at all about her or from her, I expect you to call me instantly,” she said coldly. “I’ll have Leland come and get her things out of your barn this weekend. I never did think living upstairs in a dog barn was up to any decent standard, but…”

  “But Lulu wanted it, and you let her,” Emily thought. “And you were the one who tried every way you knew how to get her to come home and get swallowed up in all that drinking and partying, and you were the one who practically threw Yancey Byrd in her face. And if you didn’t know about the liquor and the things that he did to her, you might wonder if a different kind of mother would have known. She tried to tell you.”

  But of course she said none of this, and Maybelle rocketed out of the driveway in her dusty Mercedes toward the highway and Maybud. No one at Sweetwater ever saw her again.

  “That wasn’t fair,” Emily said, fighting tears.

  Her father looked at her thoughtfully, seeming for once to see her.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

  Leland did indeed come, with a crew of Maybud workers, and moved Lulu’s pretty things out of the barn, and drove away with them, and the barn was empty and echoing again, as if two girls had never laughed and preened and talked late into the nights in it.

  Emily heard nothing more about Lulu Foxworth. She did not know if her father had, and did not ask. She had no idea whether Lulu had come home, or whether she was still lost and at large with Yancey Byrd. She was not mentioned again at Sweetwater, not until much later, but the place where she was not howled with emptiness, and everyone walked softly, as if afraid they might step on her shadow.

  And so Emily, dragging her great guilt, embraced the silence, when it came, like a mother or father. Like a lover.

  In early March UPS brought two packages for Emily. They were waiting on the bed in her room when she got home from school. Cleta would have brought them up, she knew. Elvis lay beside them with his chin on his paws, looking up at her.

  “Look. We got presents.”

  Emily opened the larger one first. It was very large, the size of a window, and fairly light. Ripping away the brown wrapping paper she saw, flaming out of the wrapping, the savage, blazing colors of empty steel blue sky, the black of wheeling winged predators, the red of bloody-handed men holding their terrible bowls up to the indifferent sun. The painting that Lulu so loved, by Richard Hagerty, that had lit her chaste nun’s cell over the barn into a pagan priestess’s temple. Lulu! Lulu was somewhere safe, at least safe enough to s
end this savage, beautiful message to her. Emily’s heart hammered with joy.

  The painting was a shout of power and strength. In its presence the guilt that hung about Emily was blown away.

  “Look what Lulu sent us,” she whispered to Elvis. “She remembers! She’s okay, somewhere.”

  He did not reply.

  She got up and carried the painting over to the wall of windows that overlooked the back verandah and the dock and the river. It looked right there, one with the great, spare elements of water and earth and sky. Only then did Emily come back to the pile of wrapping paper and scrabble for the note that she knew would be there. And it was.

  It was written in bold black ink on an ivory vellum card, the kind that Lulu always used. At the top, Louisa Coltrane Foxworth was engraved in simple script. Her eyes dropped to the signature at the bottom.

  “Grand,” it read.

  At first she did not comprehend what she was reading, and then it came clear and shock flooded her whole body. She sat stiffly, stock still, letting its surf break over her.

  “Grand.” Lulu’s grandmother, old Mrs. Foxworth. Of course. Lulu’s name was Louisa Cobb Foxworth, after some unremembered ancestor; Lulu had told her that. The painting was not, after all, a message from Lulu. Emily had not thought of Grand since Lulu had gone.

  Numbly she began to read.

  Emily, dear, I remember how much you liked this painting, and thought my granddaughter would like you to have it. Nobody else at Maybud will give it house room, and I don’t know if I’m going to keep the cottage or not, so it needs a home. If you like, you can just look after it until, perhaps, you can return it to Lulu. That would be a happy day, wouldn’t it?