“Yep. Only it was ‘Yellow Submarine.’ I dropped the sucker before the first five bars were over.”
“God, Caro, couldn’t you have sung the National Anthem or something?”
“Well, I did a tap dance while I was twirling. I never could sing. It didn’t matter what you did, if your boobs stuck out and you could walk in high heels. I had pretty good boobs then.”
“That’s the most un-Lowcountry thing I ever heard,” Lottie howled happily.
“I keep telling you, I’m not from the Lowcountry,” I said. “I’m a million miles removed from the Lowcountry. I’m no more a Lowcountry native than you are. Everybody just thinks I am because Clay has made a religion of it. It’s almost as strange to me right now as it was the first time I laid eyes on it. I get invited to parties South of Broad about as often as you do. It’s Clay who goes to those.”
Lottie is originally from West Virginia and is what Clay calls good old country stock. What he means is white trash. Hillbilly. She is nearly six feet tall, walks like she is plowing a mule, has shoulders as wide as a linebacker’s and dishwater-blond hair chopped impatiently so that it will not hang in her eyes. Her skin is permanently the red-brown of old cordovan shoes, from the sun. Her voice is nasal and flat, her eyes are the faded blue of old denim, and her hands are the size and shape of coal scuttles. She is also an artist of stunning originality and talent. Her enormous, flaming primitive oils hang in galleries and museums all up and down the East Coast. Her strange, soaring iron sculptures are in collections all over America. She gets upwards of fifteen thousand dollars for her small paintings and I don’t even know how much for the larger ones. She works so slowly that she rarely does more than three or four pieces a year, will not accept commissions, and still lives in the ramshackle former filling station that she moved into thirty years ago, on an undistinguished two-lane blacktop road that threads the middle of the island. My grandfather, who was intrigued with her gift and her grit, rented it to her some years before he deeded the island to Clay and stipulated that she be allowed to live there as long as she liked. Clay thinks that she was more to my grandfather than tenant, though she was only twenty when she first came to the island, and he may be right. Lottie sleeps with whomever she pleases and does not try to conceal the fact, though with no one from the Plantation, that I know of. Her gentlemen callers all seem to be from off-island, to judge from the tags on their automobiles. She built her studio herself, from random ends of lumber, and it looks like a chicken house on the outside and is glorious inside with light and space. When I asked her, when we first met, why she chose Peacock’s Island, she said, “The light,” and I knew what she meant. I soon found that I usually did, about everything. She is my best friend. Clay cannot stand her, nor she him. Both of them have finally worked around to a point where they simply do not discuss the other anymore.
But there are other ways of showing enmity, and Lottie’s disgusted snorts and Clay’s still, cold silences get their messages across. I know he thinks she is sluttish, slovenly, an eyesore in Eden, and worst of all in his primer of sins, lazy. He is probably right on all counts. She thinks he is cold, calculating, far fonder of money than me, and worst of all in her primer, a despoiler of the wild. I never thought of Clay as any of those things, not the Clay I met and fell in love with and married. But so many of the things I never thought have come about, and so many that I did think have failed to do so, that I sometimes trust my own judgment last after anyone else’s. It’s easier to think Lottie is wrong about Clay, though I have to admit that she has seldom been about other things.
But we all have our blind spots, don’t we? Oh, yes, we do. And I figure Clay is hers. Just as he is mine.
Lord, the day I first met him! He will never seem more beautiful, more whole, more hypnotically charming than he did on the day his friend Hayes Howland brought him over to the island to meet my grandfather. Poor Clay; he would hate that if I told him, hate that in my mind, he reached his ascendancy before I even knew him well. But I never have told him, and I never will.
It was in July, just at dusk. It had been a strange, unsettled day of running cloud shadow; little winds that started up and doubled back upon themselves and then died; sudden warm, hard spatters of rain that left the earth and air steaming and shimmering. Later we would surely have a storm. I was visiting from Columbia, where we had just moved, and had brought my watercolors and easel with me and was sitting on the dock at the end of the long, dilapidated wooden walkway that led from the marsh house to the tidal creek, where my grandfather kept his Boston Whaler and his canoe, trying to catch the spectral light. I was between my freshman and sophomore years at Converse, just tasting my gift. The dazzle to the west, where the sun hung red, preparing to flame and die behind the long sweep of emerald marsh, was overwhelming; I could not look into it without shading my eyes.
I heard them before I saw them, heard the slow putt-putt of an outboard lost somewhere in the rose-gold dazzle, and turned to look toward it, squinting. The boat came out of the light, its engine silent, and loomed up almost at the dock where I sat. It bumped the rubber fender and wallowed to rest. Hayes got out first; I knew him slightly, from other visits he had made to my grandfather during my own summer stays, but I stared anyway. He was resplendent in a white linen suit, with the light gilding his red head, and looked far better in both than he usually did. Hayes is substantial and sometimes engaging, but he is not handsome.
“Hi, Caro,” he said. “I’ve brought y’all a visitor.”
“Hi, Hayes,” I said back. “That’s nice.”
A tall young man got out behind him. He wore white linen also, but you noticed the man and not the suit, instead of just the opposite, as with Hayes; it might have been his everyday garb, it seemed so right and easy on his long body. A white linen suit in an Edwardian cut, and white buck shoes. He had a great, flowing blue satin tie. It should have looked foppish but did not. The light made an old-gold helmet of his hair and slanted into his eyes so that they flamed out of his narrow, tanned face, an impossible, firestruck blue. He smiled and the spindrift light glanced on white teeth. He had a flower in his buttonhole, a small, tight, old-fashioned pink sweetheart rose, and in his long, brown hands he held a bouquet of them.
“This is Clay Venable,” Hayes said. “We roomed together a couple of years at Virginia. He’s been a fool over the Lowcountry since the first time I brought him home with me, and I’ve finally talked him into moving to Charleston. He wanted to see some real, unspoiled marshland and I thought of your granddaddy’s place right off the bat. I guess you can’t get much more unspoiled than Peacock’s. This is Caroline Aubrey, Clay. Mr. Aubrey’s granddaughter. Did I tell you she was an artiste as well as a beauty?”
“Miss Aubrey,” Clay Venable said, holding the bouquet out to me. “I thought you might like these. We’ve been at a fancy garden party in Charleston and I stole them off a bush on the way out. Better take them before my hostess comes after me in a motorboat.”
“Her gardener, you mean,” Hayes said lazily. “In a cigarette boat. We’ve been at Marguerite MacMillan’s, Caro. I thought if Clay was going to be a Lowcountry boy he might as well start out in the virtual holy of holies. Little did I know he’d be filching roses out of her garden before the afternoon was over. Can’t take him anywhere.”
I put out my hands and took the roses, but I did not speak. I could not seem to look away from this tall, radiant being clothed in white and molten rose-gold light. I remember thinking that his voice did not really sound Southern; it was deep and soft and slow, but somehow crisp. There was something else about him that did not seem native, either, though I could not have said what it was then, and still cannot. Clay was born on a farm in Indiana, but by that time he had so submerged himself into the fabric of the Lowcountry that there were few traces of the rural Indiana scholarship boy left, and of course by now there are none at all. Clay is more a denizen of this coast now than someone generations born to it.
“You g
on’ ask us in, Caro?” Hayes said, and my face flamed at the amusement in his voice.
“Yes. Please come on up to the house. Granddaddy’s having his sundowner. He’ll love some company. He’s always saying he’ll never make a drinker out of me. Well, not that he’d really want to, of course…thank you,” I said, remembering the roses, and caught my platform heel in a crack of the dock, and lurched to one knee. The roses sailed over the weathered cypress railing and disappeared into the sea of reeds and black water.
There was a small silence, and then Clay Venable said, “A simple ‘no thank you’ would have sufficed.”
I froze in mortification, and then the amusement under his words penetrated my fog of misery, and I began to laugh. He laughed, too, and helped me to my feet, and Hayes laughed, and after that it was all right. By the time he had been introduced to my grandfather and the bourbon had been poured, and we sat on the screened porch looking out over the silvering marsh, Clay Venable was as much one of us as Hayes or any of the other young men from Charleston and the islands that my grandfather was accustomed to greeting when he encountered them hunting or fishing or canoeing on the wild tidal creeks and inlets of Peacock’s Island. It was common knowledge that the island belonged to my grandfather, but it was also common knowledge that he did not mind the occasional sporting visitor, so long as they did not disturb the pristine tranquillity of the marsh and woods. Indeed, he had known most of them since they were small boys and came to Peacock’s with their fathers.
Dark fell, the sudden thick, furry blackness of the Lowcountry marshes, unpricked by any lights at all except the kerosene lantern that sat on a table on the porch and the citronella candles I had lit. The house had electricity, but my grandfather disliked it, and often went days without lighting an electric lamp. He had no such qualms about other appliances, and happily used his small, battered refrigerator and the old stove and even the jerry-rigged washer and dryer that sat on the other end of the porch. But he loved lamplight, and it is what I use mostly when I am at the house even to this day. I find that it calls him back to me as little else does.
I don’t remember much of what we talked about: Hayes’s job at one of the ubiquitous law firms on Broad Street, I think, and how restless he felt there, closed away from the beaches and marshes and rivers and creeks where so many Charleston boys spent great chunks of their boyhood. My studies at Converse, and the painting that I was doing on the island that summer. The herd of wild ponies that had chomped and stomped its stolid way around the back part of the island since I could remember. The monster bull gator my grandfather had seen the day before, and the panther that he swore he had heard scream in the deep blacknesses of several past nights. The drought that was decimating the coast that summer and how badly my grandfather’s year-round property in McClellanville was suffering from it. I did not think he was unduly upset about the drought in McClellanville; since my grandmother had died several years before, he had spent more and more of his time at the marsh house, and left it now largely to look after his banking business in Charleston, or to make a run to a hardware or grocery store. He had even, the winter before, put in a big cast-iron stove in the bedroom where he slept, so that, with the huge stone fireplace in the living area, the house was habitable through the brief, icy spasms of the Lowcountry winter.
“Don’t you get lonesome out here?” I asked him once.
“No,” he had said in honest surprise. “Why would I? Everywhere you look something alive is slapping the water or shiverin’ the bushes. And when you run out of the live ones, there’s plenty of not-so-live ones, let me tell you. Many’s the night I’ve passed in the company of somebody who left these parts a hundred, two hundred years ago.”
I knew that he was teasing me, but only with the top part of my mind. The old, bottom part nodded sagely: Yes. I can see that that’s so. I have always felt that there were many levels of beings on Peacock’s Island, many more souls than currently wear flesh. It is not, on the main, a bad feeling at all.
Finally, that night, we got around to Clay Venable. I knew that my grandfather was as curious about him as I was, but his natural, grave good manners decreed that he make Clay feel at home before asking him to share much of himself.
“I don’t think you’re native to these parts, but you seem to have taken to them right well,” he said mildly to Clay after a while. They were on their second or third leisurely bourbons, and off in the trees the katydids and marsh peepers had started their evening chorus. Overhead the huge, swollen stars flowered in the hot night.
“No, I come from hill country, in Indiana, around Bloomington. I’d never seen the ocean till I got to Virginia and came home with Hayes. My folks were red-dirt farmers, poor as church mice. After that…well, I guess I was sunk. It was like I was born in the wrong place and only just found the right one when I got down here. There’s never been any other part of the world I wanted to see, not after I saw this. I went back to Indiana after I graduated and worked at an insurance agency until I could save enough to pay off my student loans and get a little ahead. Then I headed down here like an arrow from a bow. I don’t know yet what I’ll be doing, but I’ll be doing it here. I do know that.”
It was 1972, and a looming recession threatened hundreds of thousands of workers across the country. Small businesses were closing; larger ones were cutting back or at the very least freezing their hiring. Around Charleston, the strictures of an energy crisis and unavailable gasoline slowed the flood of tourist dollars to a trickle. It was a disaster of a year, all told, and yet Clay Venable sat on my grandfather’s porch and spoke calmly of a limitless future in the Lowcountry that was an assured fact, a done deal. I believed him absolutely, even before Hayes Howland laughed ruefully and said, “Lest you think he’s blowing smoke rings, at least three guys at Marguerite MacMillan’s as much as offered him jobs tonight. I don’t know what it is he’s got, but whatever, this old boy’s gon’ do all right for himself down here.”
My grandfather laughed. It was a friendly sound, a laugh offered by one equal to another.
“What would you do if you had your druthers, Clay?” he said.
Clay did not hesitate.
“I’d take all this”—and he gestured around him at the marsh and the night—“and I’d make sure that nothing ever changed the basic…nature of it, the sense of it, like it is now…and I’d make it available to a few very special people who would see it for what it is, and love it for that, and want to live here. And no one else, ever.”
Hayes snorted, and my grandfather said, “You mean…a subdivision, or something? Develop it?”
His voice was still mild and interested, but I knew how he felt about the marshes and the islands of the Lowcountry. My heart sank. I might have known Clay Venable was too perfect; there had to be something wrong.…
“What I have in mind is about as far from a subdivision development as it’s possible to get,” Clay said, looking intently at my grandfather. In the lamplight his blue eyes burned. “In my…place…the land and the water and the wildlife would come first, people second. Not a house, not a hedge, not a fireplug would go up that did not blend so perfectly into the wild that you had to look twice to see it. Not an alligator would be relocated; not a raccoon or a deer would be run out. I would never forget who was here first. And I would have no one in my place who did not feel the same way.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Never heard of a place like that,” my grandfather said finally.
“There’s never been one,” Clay Venable said. “But there will be, and it will be mine, and it will be somewhere on this coast. I know that.”
“Take more money than God’s got,” my grandfather said.
“I can get the money,” Clay said. “If I can get the right piece of land, I can get the money.”
“Don’t you have it backwards?” My grandfather chuckled. “How you gon’ get a chunk of prime oceanfront or marshland without any money? Not much of that left. And another
thing…any empty land I can think of around here hasn’t got mainland access. Not an automobile bridge between here and Hilton Head. How you gon’ find this wild land with a bridge already built?”
“Because I’ve got a master plan,” Clay Venable said. “It’s as detailed and complete as it’s humanly possible to make it. I’ve been working on it for three years, ever since I got out of college. Since before then, really; since the second or third time I came down here with Hayes. I’ve gotten two or three of the best young architects on the East Coast to work on it, strictly gratis, and city planners and environmental specialists and lawyers, and I’ve gotten the Sierra Club people and the Coastal Conservancy folks to put in their two cents’ worth, and the U.S. Corps of Engineers. None of them would take a penny. It will work. It’s a beautiful plan. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s ready to go. I am absolutely sure that if the right people see it, the land and the bridge and then the money will follow. I know that. I don’t mind working at…whatever…for a few years until I can get it going.”
My grandfather took a long swig of bourbon and rattled the ice in his glass.
“Where is this plan?” he said.
“In a bank vault back in Charleston. And there’s a copy at my bank at home in Bloomington.”
“Who’s seen it?”
“Nobody yet. Except the guys who’ve worked on it, of course, and they’re sworn to secrecy. They’ll be partners, so I don’t worry about them letting it out. Outside of them, nobody.”
“I’ll say,” Hayes said. “Not only have I not seen it, I haven’t heard the first word about it. Jesus, Clay…I had no idea! Why didn’t you tell me, show it to me? I can help you with it.…”
“It’s not time yet. When it’s time, I will. I wasn’t hiding it from you, Hayes.”
“I’d like to see a thing like that,” my grandfather said, as if to no one in particular. “I reckon that would be something to see.”
“I could bring it out tomorrow or one day soon,” Clay Venable said, and smiled, a swift, transforming smile that I had not seen before. My breath stopped.
Low Country Page 4
