I felt the little wind again, stronger this time.
“God, that’s marvelous,” Clay breathed. “That’s just marvelous.”
He looked back, his face rapt and blinded. I thought at first he was looking at me, but then I saw that he was looking past me to the big gator as it lay submerged, just off the receding bank behind us. My skin prickled.
“Marvelous isn’t exactly the term I would have used,” I said.
But, “I reckon that’s just what it is, Clay,” my grandfather said, and I felt obscurely rebuffed.
We got back to the dock just as the sun was disappearing in a conflagration of rose red across the forest on the mainland to the west. The water of the creek was dappled red and gold, and the sweet, damp thickness that twilight brought seemed to drop down over us like a shawl. I have always felt that you wear the air of the Lowcountry somehow. It is not thin like other air.
Clay thanked my grandfather seriously and politely for the afternoon, but he made no move to go. He did not even look at his borrowed boat, bobbing in the settling wake our own had made. He simply stood there, tall in the falling darkness, his mouse-fur hair in his eyes, the angry splotches made by the mosquitoes glowing on his arms and legs. I knew they must itch fiercely by now, but he made no move to scratch them. A new squadron came in from the marshes, level and low, and sang around our heads. I shook mine angrily. Mosquitoes make me childish and stupid.
My grandfather swatted the back of his neck and I looked at him in surprise. I did not think mosquitoes bit him. He did not look at me.
“Let’s get on in the house before they take us off clear over to Edisto,” he said. “Clay, you need to put something on those bites, and then I think you ought to have some supper with us and forget about going back till the morning. We’ve got a guest room, such as it is, and I got a mess of crabs this morning. Cleaned ’em before you came. Some beer on ice, too. You don’t want to try to feel your way back over to Edisto in the dark. Levi might get you if Shem doesn’t.”
I waited for Clay to demur, to say that he wouldn’t think of putting us out, but he did not.
“I’d really like that,” he said. “There’s an awful lot I want to ask you about the island. Both of you,” he said, looking at me as if remembering I was there.
“Granddaddy’s the historian,” I said shortly, and went to take a shower and anoint my own bites. I was annoyed with Clay Venable; he had said hardly a word to me all day. I would, I thought, have supper with them and then excuse myself and go to bed. Let them sit on the porch and gab the night away.…
But I pulled out a new pair of flowered bell bottoms and a pale pink T-shirt that I knew would look dramatic against my tan, and sprayed on some of the Ma Griffe my stepfather had given me for Christmas. I knew that my mother had told him what to get, but still, I liked the cologne. It smelled both sweet and tart, like summer itself. I twisted my heavy hair up off my neck and pinned it on the top of my head. The day’s humidity had turned it to wiry frizz, and if I had let it fall loose it would have stood out like an afro. For not the first time, I considered ironing it and then shook my head angrily at myself and simply twisted it up and skewered it with hairpins. I did put on some lipstick, though, something I almost never did on the island.
“You look pretty,” my grandfather said when I came out onto the porch. He and Clay were sitting in the old wooden rocking chairs, their feet up on the rail, drinking beers. Clay smiled at me.
“You really do,” he said. “Like a Spanish painting, with your hair up. Velázquez or somebody. One of the infantas.”
“You like art?” I said. “As well as alligators?”
“I like lots of things,” he said, “art among them. I had four years of art appreciation at Virginia. They do pretty well by you. Your grandfather tells me you’re a real artist, though. I’d like to see some of your work.”
“Maybe sometime,” I said, and then, because it sounded so ungracious, “If you still want to, I’ll show you some of the things I’ve been doing this summer before you go in the morning.”
We feasted on boiled blue crabs, then sat while thick, utter darkness fell down suddenly, like a cast net, and the stars appeared, hot and huge and silver, and fireflies pricked the darkness. They talked of the island, Clay and my grandfather, or rather my grandfather did, mostly. He talked of many things, slowly and casually, anecdotally, spinning his stories out judiciously like a tribal bard. He talked some more about Levi and about the skeleton of the osprey someone had found on Hunting Island, with the skeleton of the great fish still caught in its claws.
“They never let go,” he said. “That fish was so big it pulled that old osprey right under, and he still wouldn’t let go. Drowned him.”
“God,” Clay breathed, as if he was hearing stories of the Holy Grail, and my own eyes pricked with tears. I could not have said why.
He talked of the pirates who had dodged in and out of the Sea Islands, and of Captain John Peacock and his ignominious career, and of the great rice and indigo and Sea Island cotton plantations that flourished on the islands from Georgetown to Daufuskie Island, and of the plantation society and economy that had shaped a slow, graceful, symmetrical, and totally doomed way of life. He talked about the Gullahs and how they came over the Middle Passage from Gold Coast West Africa in chains to work the fertile lowland fields, specially catalogue-ordered by the American planters, from Senegal, Angola, Gambia, and Sierra Leone for the agricultural skills and the strong sense of family and community that helped ensure that they would not try to run away and leave their people. He told of the strange, rich old songs he had heard in the pray houses of the islands, and of the shouts that are songs, and of the dancing of ring plays and the knitting of circular nets and the weaving of sweet-grass baskets and the cooking of fish, yams, and okra; of the tales of trickster rabbits, vain crows, and sly foxes, and the darker, more terrible things that preyed in the nights on the unwary: the duppy and the plateye and their prowling succubus kin. He told of the language that was unique on earth, and sounded in the ear like music.
“Do you know any of it?” Clay asked, and my grandfather closed his eyes and sang softly, in his rusty tenor: “‘A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei tohmbe. Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; hpangga li lee.’”
I had never heard him sing or speak Gullah before and simply stared.
“What does it mean?” Clay Venable said.
“It means, ‘Come quickly, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; his heart is not yet perfectly cool. Sudden death has sharp ears.’”
We said nothing. The words curled out into the night and rose and vanished.
“It’s a funeral song, probably for a warrior,” my grandfather said. “They were maybe the most important of the tribal songs, because the West African people had such reverence for their dead, for their ancestors.”
“Where did you learn that?” I said.
“My daddy used to bring me over here hunting with him when I was little,” my grandfather said. “He had a friend, Ol’ Scrape Jackson, who was a hunting guide for the rich Yankee who owned this place. Scrape used to sing that. He taught it to me and told me what it meant. I don’t know why I’ve remembered it all these years.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said softly.
“It is that,” my grandfather said.
“Your people didn’t always own the island, then?” Clay asked.
“God, no.” My grandfather laughed. “Rich Yankee industrialist who had a plantation over on Edisto bought it off one of the old planter families down on their luck back around 1900, for a hunting lodge. Lucius Bullock, owned some steel mills, if my memory serves. My daddy and Scrape Jackson were his guides, and then his son’s, and when I was old enough and my daddy died, I took over for the son. Jimmy, that was. It was good work, seasonal, as they say, and Jimmy paid me good to do my guidin’ and to look in on the property once or twice a month when it wasn’t hunting season. There’s not much about this island I didn’t
end up knowing. You could have knocked me over with a feather when old Lucius died and left the island to me, the whole damned shooting match. Of course, it’s not a big island, and there wasn’t then and isn’t now much access to it, but still, a whole island…Well, anyhow, Jimmy didn’t want it and he wasn’t about to turn it over to the government, so I guess I was as good as anybody. It liked to have driven my wife crazy. We had a nice little place in McClellanville and I did pretty good doing some general contracting over there, and I guess she thought I’d come on home and settle down when he died. After I got it, she wouldn’t spend another single night over here. This girl is the one who’s kept me company all these summers. Weren’t for her, it would be mighty lonesome.”
Clay said nothing, and then he laughed softly.
“What?” my grandfather said.
“It’s a fabulous story,” Clay said. “It just goes to show you that a cat may still look at a king. It gives me great hope.”
“Glad it does,” my grandfather said genially, and then, “Well, I’m going on to bed. You young people set awhile. I think there might be a few shooting stars tonight. Not like the big August hoohaw, but they’re something to see out over the marsh. I think there might be a bottle of that fancy white wine Miss Caro likes in the fridge, too.”
It was then that I knew that he had planned all along for Clay Venable to stay over. I knew that Clay knew, too. I did not know whether to sit still and pretend innocence, or simply get up and go to bed, taking my mortification along with me. I sat still.
“If you’re embarrassed, don’t be,” Clay said finally, out of the darkness. “If he hadn’t asked me to stay I would have just stood there until he did. I wasn’t going home without getting to know what makes you tick.”
Somehow that broke the back of my lingering reserve. We sat in the soft darkness until very late, talking desultorily of things so ordinary that I cannot remember now what they were, finally finishing the wine, still not going in. I had lit a couple of citronella flares, so that we heard the hum of the mosquitoes but they did not come in close, and in the flickering flare light I could see the planes of his narrow face, and the flash of his teeth as he talked. At some point in the evening, aided no doubt by the wine, it seemed simply and suddenly to me that I had known the geography of that face all my life, known always the music of the voice. When the stars began to fall we stopped talking.
The last one had sunk into darkness and gone back to black, and we still had not spoken for some minutes, when we heard the scream. It rose out of the far darkness, high and infinitely terrible, rose and rose to a crescendo of grief and fury and something as wild and old and free as the earth, broke into a tremolo of despair and anguish, and then sobbed away. The very air throbbed with it long after it was gone. All the little sounds of the night had stopped. I sat stone still, my heart hammering in my throat, tears of fright and something else entirely welling up in my eyes. My fingers gripped the arms of my chair as if they alone might save me. Beside me Clay, in his chair, did not move either, did not breathe.
“My God,” I whispered finally. “My God.”
“Not an alligator, was it?” he said.
“Oh, no. No. No alligator on earth ever sounded like that,” I said. I had begun to tremble.
Then he said, “I know what it was. That was your grandfather’s panther. That’s what he’s been hearing.”
“Lord Jesus,” I said, and it was a prayer. “Then it was true.”
“Everything out here is, I think,” Clay said, and got up out of his chair and came over and put his hands on my shoulders, and kissed me.
And that was that.
3
When I came downstairs, showered and more or less together, Clay was sitting at the round table on the back veranda making notes on the omnipresent clipboard that goes everywhere with him, and Estelle was pouring coffee for him out of the little French chocolate pot that he likes to use for his coffee. Estelle and I have both tried to persuade him that in this climate pottery or china would be more suitable, but he bought the little silver pot on our honeymoon, in Cuernavaca, and admires it inordinately. The fact that someone has to polish it after every use does not bother him in the least.
“What do we have Estelle for?” he will say when I fuss about the pot.
“Not for polishing your coffeepot every morning of her life,” I say. “I’ve been doing it for years, if you must know.”
“I do know. And I thank you,” he says. “The pot makes me happy and it makes me happy that you polish it for me.”
And so I do it, because I will not ask Estelle to, and it is, after all, a small thing. He does not ask much foolishness of me. There is not much foolishness in Clay.
I knew that he had chosen the back veranda because I simply could not have looked at the sea this morning. He loves the marsh vistas, and always has, but it is the open ocean that calls to him. I sometimes think that the sheer, intense orderliness of his soul finds a kind of release in that ultimate, untamable disorder. He can sit and look at the sea for hours, though he rarely sits and looks at anything anymore for hours but whatever is on his drawing board or his clipboard. He is restless during enforced inactivity; cocktail parties are torture for him, though he goes to and gives enormous numbers of them and does the walk-through perfectly. Clay never did drink much and is impatient with the slight silliness, the looseness, that ensues after an hour or so at the best of them. He chews ice fiercely and eats enormous quantities of hors d’oeuvres, waiting to be released. When we have drinks before dinner, either at home or at a restaurant, he can go through an entire basket of bread, waiting for everyone else to finish their drinks. He sometimes waits a long time. There seems to me to be quite a lot of drinking in the Plantation. Despite the munching, I am fairly sure he has not put on an ounce since we married. I never see him weigh himself, but the contours of his long, angular body do not seem to have changed.
Estelle poured out a second cup of coffee and plonked a plate of sticky buns down in front of me. They were still warm from the oven. The rich cinnamon rose to my nose and I sniffed appreciatively, though my stomach heaved at the thought of food.
“They smell wonderful, Estelle, but I think I’ll just have coffee,” I said. “Will you put some aside for me? I’ll eat them with my tea this afternoon.”
“You eat them now,” she ordered. “You looks like the hind axle of hard times. You been up in that room, haven’t you?”
I looked over at Clay, and she said, “Mr. Clay didn’t tell me. I seen the door still open. And I know that look on yo’ face. You ain’t got no call to be broodin’ in that room, Miss Caro. It don’t do nothin’ but stir you up. She ain’t in there. She in a better place than this, and happy as a little lark. You try to rejoice in that an’ leave her po’ things be.”
I bent my head over my coffee so she would not see the unsheddable tears gather. Estelle’s faith is earth-simple and granite-hard. Not for the first time I felt a profound ache of pure envy. I had ceased negotiations with God on the day that my daughter died. I felt no anger at Him, only a dreary and cell-deep certainty that whether He was there or not, that door had slammed shut for me. There was a kind of peace in it.
We drank our coffee in silence. I was grateful for it. Clay knows that I cannot abide hovering when I am feeling out of sorts. Even if I could, I don’t think it is in him to hover. He deals with his deepest feelings by snapping them firmly into the steel grid inside him and going back to work. The night that Kylie died, he stayed at his board all night, working furiously, while I slept in a thick swamp of barbiturates. The master plan for Calista Key Plantation, on the south coast of Puerto Rico, was conceived almost in its entirety that night. It is thought by most critics to be by far Clay’s most innovative and attractive property. I have never been there. He does not go often, either. Neither of us can forget what terrible fuel fed the fire it was born in.
Finally he lifted his head and said, “You ready? I went ahead and put the flowe
rs in the car.”
And we went out into the misted morning to get the guest house ready for the new nestlings.
The Heron Marsh section of the Plantation is, except for the seaside neighborhood, the oldest. It was Clay’s thought to offer to the first venturesome investors and home buyers the choice waterfront lots on the ocean and the marsh tidal creek that separates Peacock’s from “the island.” In between, he devised lovely neighborhoods of single-family and cluster homes bordering man-made lakes, lagoons, and a golf course, each with its own pool and tennis court. So, theoretically, everyone who lives in the Plantation has his own bit of waterfront. But it is the great dazzling vistas of sea and marsh that are the prizes, and they were gone almost in the first year of the Plantation’s existence. I have always loved the Heron Marsh homes. They sit so deep in lush ocean forest that they are all but hidden from the road, and the contrast of coming out of that dark cave of green into the light that seems to pour like sour honey off the wide marshes is stunning. All the Heron Marsh homes have long back lawns and gardens that slope gently down to the reeded marsh’s edge, and the deep, swift tidal creek that is the belt on the island’s midsection is studded with docks at which cheeky outboards and slim sailboats bob. From this part of the creek you can reach the harbor and open ocean in a five-minute sail. The water is almost unfailingly calm and shining; even our fierce summer storms can’t reach their clawing fingers here. I remember that I wanted to build on Heron Marsh when I first saw it, because it looks straight over into “my” part of the island, the secret green heart where I spent so many summer weeks with my grandfather. But Clay was in love with the ocean even then. It does not bear thinking that we might still have Kylie if we had come here, and I try hard not to. I really do. I have always known that there was simply no blame to be assigned, except perhaps to my child herself. Certainly not to Clay. I sensed even in the depths of my very earliest grief that that way lay the death of our marriage.
Low Country Page 6
