“Why don’t you do that?” my grandfather said.
“Me, too?” Hayes said.
“Not yet. But soon. I promise,” Clay said.
“Well, I like that! I take you to the party of the year at the numero uno hostess’s house in Charleston, and introduce you to the movers and shakers, most of whom are falling all over themselves to offer you jobs, and you won’t let me see your…village Eden,” Hayes groused. I thought that he was only partly kidding.
“You’ll see it before anybody in Charleston,” Clay said, giving Hayes the smile. Hayes nodded, apparently satisfied.
“Would you like to see it, Miss Aubrey?” Clay said to me.
I jumped. He had not really looked at me since we had settled ourselves on the porch. His attention had been bent upon my grandfather.
“Very much,” I said, and my unused voice cracked, and I cleared my throat. “I would very much like to see it. If you can do all that and still keep the land…untouched, as you say…it would be something to see indeed.”
I realized that I sounded adversarial, and started to amend my words, and then did not. I did not think what he proposed was possible, and I did not want to see his master plan and find that, after all, it was an ordinary subdivision that would clump on stucco feet through the rich, fragile coastal land and leave little of it intact.
“Then maybe tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow would be fine,” my grandfather said. “You boys come out about midafternoon and I’ll take you out in the Whaler. Let Clay run Alligator Alley and see if he still wants to save the gators.”
“I’m a working man myself,” Hayes said, “but I know Clay would enjoy Alligator Alley. What a great idea, Mr. Aubrey. That’s just what you all should do. Only why not take the canoe? See ’em better that way.”
He came at three the next afternoon in the same outboard they had brought yesterday. I recognized it now as the one Shem Cutler, over on the tip of Edisto, sometimes rented out to hunters or crabbers. I was not waiting for him on the dock—I would have died first—but I was watching from the porch of the house. It is set on stilts, a former hunting shack grown large and rambling over the years, and you can see a long way from it. He was not nearly as proficient as Hayes with the boat. I could see that he was coming in too fast, and he hit the dock with a resounding smack, bounced off it, and had to balance himself with an oar when the resulting watery circles rocked him crazily. I smiled to myself. Ever since he had spoken about his impossibly idyllic Lowcountry community I had felt vaguely and sullenly resentful of him, the dazzle of his initial appearance safely dissipated. This place, this island, belonged to us, my grandfather and me, and the small settlement of Gullah Negroes over in Dayclear, at the other end of the island, and the ponies and the gators and the ghosts and all the other beings, quick and dead, who had their roots here. Who was this man, this upstart, land-bound Yankee, to come down here and tell us that he was going to transform it?
I was obscurely pleased to see, as he walked carefully down the listing boardwalk toward the house, that in the full afternoon light he did not look golden at all, not impossibly slim and tipped with flame. His hair was merely brown, the silverbrown of a mouse’s fur, almost the same shade as his face and hands, and he was more skinny than slender. I could see, too, now that he wore an ordinary work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and not a suit of radiant white linen, that the tan stopped at his wrists, as a farmer’s did, and that his legs, in a pair of faded cut-off jeans, were the greenish-white of a fish’s belly.
“The mosquitoes are going to eat him alive before we’ve left the dock,” I said with satisfaction to my grandfather, who stood beside me, and was surprised at myself. Where was this venom coming from? I had been ready to follow him to hell or Bloomington when I first met him.
“Young feller got under your skin, has he?” My grandfather grinned, and I had to grin back. It had long been a joke between us that as soon as a young man showed substantial interest in me, my own evaporated like dew in the sun. A fair number of them had, over the years; I had my mother’s vivid darkness and my unremembered father’s fine-bladed features, and knew that they all added up, somehow, to more than they should have. I was not particularly vain of my looks, Miss South Carolina notwithstanding; good looks had not, after all, gotten my mother very much except a young husband who left us when I was four and another who was, to me, as remote as a photograph. In my experience, a man who came in the front door was that much closer to the back one. I solved that by leaving first. I could see that I was doing it again. My grandfather was right. Clay Venable had gotten further under my hide in a shorter time than anyone ever had.
Just the same I was glad that he had proved to be an ordinary, skinny, milk-pale Yankee after all. I had nothing to fear from him. And then he raised his head and saw us on the porch and smiled, and the ordinariness vanished like smoke in the wind, like a disguise that he had cast off. My heart flopped, fishlike, in my chest.
“Shit,” I whispered.
My grandfather laughed aloud.
Peacock’s Island is a small barrier island in St. Helena’s Sound, fitting like a loose stopper in the bottleneck formed by Edisto and Otter Islands to the north, Harbor and Hunting Islands to the south, and the shallow bay created by the confluence of the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers to the west. It lies in a great, 350,000-acre wilderness called the Ace Basin, an estuarine ecosystem so rich in layers upon layers of life, so fertile and green and secret, so very old, so totally set apart from the world of men and machines—and yet so close among them—that there is literally no other place remotely like it on earth. Other areas in the Lowcountry that were once this pristine have irrevocably gone over to man now, and cannot be reclaimed, but a combination of private and public agencies have set their teeth and shoulders to safeguard the Ace, and now protect sizable swatches of it.
The bottom 91,000 acres of the Ace Basin are tidal marsh and barrier islands, scalloped by dunes older than time itself and thick with unique maritime forests of live oaks, loblolly and slash pines, palmettos, magnolia, and cedar. It is possible, on Peacock’s and the other barrier islands of the Lowcountry, to encounter, in a day’s walk or canoe trip: bald eagles, ospreys, wood storks, an amazing variety of ducks and herons, wading birds and shorebirds and songbirds. My grandfather said that someone had counted sixty-nine bird species in the great arc of the Ace. You can also see—or rather, perhaps, see tracks of—another eighty-three species of reptiles and amphibians, including a fearsome array of watersnakes and the big, thick, brutish rattlers of the Lowcountry, and, of course, the ever-present ranks of alligators. I have seen, during my summers there, whitetail deer, bobcats, foxes, rabbits, otters, raccoons, wild pigs, possums, and some fleeting things that I will never be able to name. The ponies are an aberration; no one is quite sure where they came from, but my grandfather thinks they are offspring of the tough little marsh tackies that used to dot the interior of Hilton Head and the larger Sea Islands, themselves offspring, perhaps, of the ponies brought by the English planters to work the lowland fields. He believes that the first of the Gullah settlers over in Dayclear brought the sire and dam of this herd with them, and since no one is sure when that was, the provenance of the ponies is as misty and unsubstantial as the marshes themselves. The Gullahs can only tell you that the ponies have been there “always.”
The panther that my grandfather swore he heard in the nights should not, by rights, have been on the island at all, since no one has seen or heard of a panther in the Ace Basin since time out of mind. I certainly never saw one. But I believe there was one in my grandfather’s time, for in that vast, succoring basin, one-third light, one-third water, and only one-third substantial earth, life in all its abundance has evolved all but unseen for millions of years, infused twice a day by the great salt breath of the tides, and that panther was as surely a child of the Southern moon as the blue crabs and the dolphins and the eagles and the men who came so late to it. I believe that. I do
.
It was out into all this that we took Clay Venable, my grandfather Aubrey and I, on a July afternoon in 1972, and none of us came back unchanged. You often don’t, in the Lowcountry.
Alligator Alley is a straight stretch of Wappinaw Creek, one of the secret black-water creeks and inlets that cut the island like watersnakes. From my grandfather’s dock you could reach it, in the Whaler, in a few minutes. In the canoe, however, it took about a half hour, and we passed that in near silence, broken only by the slapping of hands on mosquito-bitten flesh. They were mostly Clay Venable’s hands, and his flesh. I had slathered myself with Cutter’s before I left the house, and my grandfather, for some reason, never seemed to be bitten. Finally, after watching Clay endure the ordeal in silence, I relented, and reached into my pocket and brought out the tube of repellent, and passed it up to him. I sat in the rear of the big canoe, and my grandfather in front. Clay was our middleman.
He took the ointment from me and turned and gave me a level, serious look from the pale blue eyes.
“I forgot I had it,” I found myself saying defensively, and felt myself flush red. I would be all right, I thought, as long as I did not get the full bore of those eyes.
Clay still did not speak, but I noticed that his head was always in slight motion, turning this way and that, as he looked at everything we passed. An osprey took off from a nest on a dead bald cypress at the edge of the creek and Clay tracked it. An anhinga dropped from a low-lying limb of a live oak when we turned from a broader stretch of creek into Alligator Alley and he noted it. He marked and measured a turtle sunning on a reed-grown bank; the flash of a whitetail far off in a lightly forested hummock; the brilliant green explosions of cinnamon and resurrection ferns; the vast, rippling green seas of cordgrass and the great, primeval towers of the bald cypresses, dwarfing all else. I had the notion that he was somehow photographing all of it, so that he would never lose it, but could replay it at will on the screen of his mind whenever he chose.
I learned later that this was not far from true. Something within him, some sort of infinite receptacle, must fix, store, catalogue, file away. It was my first experience of his disconcerting, now-legendary intensity. When he brought it into play, it precluded whimsy, idleness, pensiveness, even the sort of comfortable, unfocused dreaminess in which I and most other people pass a good deal of our time. He can suspend this thing, whatever it is, when he wants and needs to, and often does, but I know by now that it costs him something; that the effort is to drift on the moment, not to focus and record it, as it is with most of us. That, of course, accounted for the impact of those extraordinary eyes, and the force of the smile was the sheer relief and exuberance you felt when he freed you of it. The smile was his gift to you. All this I saw in one great leap that afternoon, from watching the back of Clay Venable’s head. The knowledge did not sit comfortably on my heart.
The banks rise higher along Alligator Alley, as flat on top as manmade dams, overgrown with reeds and slicked with mud. Over them, far away, you can see the tops of the upland forests, but in the near and middle distance there is nothing but reeds and sky and creekbanks. Stumps and broken logs punctuate the reeds and grasses on the banks and in the edge of the black water, and more stumps protrude from the water at intervals. It looks for all the world as if heavy logging had gone on along this creek. It is not a particularly beautiful or interesting stretch of water, and the sun beats relentlessly onto the tops of heads and shoulders, and if you are in a canoe, your shoulder muscles have, by now, started to sting from the paddling. In the canoe, you sit very low in the dark water. The landscape is completely bounded by the rough, looming sunblasted creekbanks.
I waited.
To me, it is always like those drawings you used to see as a child, the one where you are supposed to find the animals in the intricately drawn mass of a forest. At first you see nothing, and then they begin to appear: a lion here, a leopard there, the ruffle of a bird’s wing in a tree, the smirking face of a lamb in the tall grass. That is how the alligators come. At first you see nothing but reeds and grass and broken stumps, and then you see, as if by magic, the great, terrible, knobbed head of a gator, and then the whole gator, and then another, and then another. Afterward, you can never understand why you did not see them at once.
So the alligators of Alligator Alley came. I heard Clay’s breath draw in slightly as the first gator appeared on the bank above us, as if in a developing photograph. After that he was silent, but his head tracked them as they materialized, one after another. Eventually, there were eighteen or twenty of them in sight. I can never be sure I have counted them correctly.
I have seen them every summer now since I was seven or eight, and they never fail to stop my breath and chill my heart. I know all the comforting folk wisdom about them: that they cannot bite under water, that they seldom attack humans except in self-defense, that they do not go after things larger than themselves. Certainly not a boat. I know that if you sit quietly in your craft, or stand quietly, they will disregard you, and that they have poor peripheral vision, so that if you stay to their sides you are presumably safe. Still they make the hair on my nape and arms rise and something deep within me goes into an ancient and feral crouch. They are simply such sinister, implacable things, knobbed and armored like dragons out of nightmares, seemingly formed of mud and stone and obsidian and malachite, the color of stagnant water, the color of muddy death. And as for their reputed harmlessness, every Lowcountry native has a story about the cat, the dog, the small child snatched from the bank by those incredible scalloped jaws. I have seen myself, on the island, the nubs of an occasional hand or foot said to have been taken by a gator. And down on Hilton Head, in the big, developed resort plantations, the shelf life of poodles and shih tzus is not long at all, not in the prized lagoon homesites.
My grandfather taught me early to be absolutely silent when we passed the alligators, and so I always am. They are not always in precisely the same place, but they do seem always to be in a cluster, and so it does not take long to pass them. These today did not move much, except to lift their huge heads lazily as we drifted past, and once or twice I heard the dry swish as a thick tail stirred in the reeds. They are usually on the bank this time of day, in the summer, taking the sun now that some of the heat has gone out of it; earlier, they would have been in the water, only their knobbed yellow-rimmed eyes showing, so that they seemed to be submerged logs, or the knots of limbs and roots. Then you cannot see their size, but when they are on the bank, of course, you can. These were big ones, mostly. I’d say they ran from about ten feet to thirteen or fourteen. One or two smaller ones, adolescent children, lay curled close to their mothers, blending into the grayish mud. If there were very small ones they would be out of sight near the nests. Even with their fearsome bulk, they are misleadingly innocent when they bask lazily like this. They look as if they could not move except ponderously, dragging that scaled hugeness on short, bent legs. But they can move like lightning, can be down a bank and into the water in an eye flicker. I have seen that. I usually hold my breath until we are past them.
We almost were when one of the submerged logs in the water began to move, to glide lazily after the canoe. I drew in my breath and did not let it out again. My grandfather looked back at Clay and me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I knew that he meant us to be still and silent. The alligator did not lift its head, but the eyes followed us, closing on the canoe, and my grandfather kept up his steady, leisurely paddling. I followed suit, but my shoulder muscles cried out to dig in, to paddle faster, to stroke with all my might. I did not look to the right or left, except once, and then I could see the gator’s head almost abreast of me in the rear of the canoe. I looked back slightly farther. Just under the sun-dappled surface of the water I could see its body. It seemed, in the shifting green-blackness, to go on forever. It was like looking down into a bright summer sea and seeing, under its glittering surface, the long, dark, death’s shape of a submarine, ghosting silently
beside you. I shut my eyes and paddled.
After what seemed an eternity my grandfather said, in his normal voice, “I heard there was a big one around this year. Shem Cutler saw him early one morning, taking a raccoon. Said he looked like a damned dinosaur. Shem reckoned he might be eighteen or twenty feet. I hear they’ve been losing pigs and a hound or two over at Dayclear, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ain’t old Levi.”
“Levi?” I croaked, finally looking back. The gator had apparently lost interest in us and turned toward the bank. He did not come out of the water, though. In another stroke or two we were past the convocation of gators.
“The Gullahs tell about a giant alligator that’s always been around these parts, bigger than any of the others by a country mile. They say you can hear him bellowing in the nights as far as Edisto. Every time a piglet or a dog or a chicken goes missing, they say that it’s Levi. Nobody much sees him and they say you can’t catch him. Gators do live to be right old, but if the tales are true, this old boy would be near about two hundred years old. If that was Levi, you kids have got something to tell your grandchildren. Figuratively speaking, of course.”
And he grinned at Clay and me. I felt the red flood into my face again.
“Can all that be true?” Clay said with great interest.
“Naw, I don’t reckon so,” my grandfather said. “Be something for Ripley if it was. All the same, the old tales don’t die out. And that was one big mother of a gator. You just don’t ever know, in the Lowcountry.”
I felt something on the back of my neck that was like a cold little wind under the heavy sun.
“Who named him Levi?” I said.
“I’ve always heard that one of the first preachers at the little pray house in Dayclear did, after he was supposed to have gone off with three children in one year. It’s short for Leviathan.”
Low Country Page 5
