Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  The house Clay uses as a guest house is the largest of twelve on the marsh. It was built for a very rich family from Spartanburg who had eight children and innumerable grandchildren, and so it sprawls octopuslike among its azaleas and oleanders and great ferns and overhanging live oaks, harboring a staggering number of smallish bedrooms, each with its own bath. There is an enormous family room and a kitchen and dining room that can accommodate an emerging nation, a wraparound veranda that steps down one step to a huge pool, and two Har-Tru tennis courts at the fringe of the water. It is made of our tradition-hallowed tabby, a mixture of sand and crushed oyster shell that dates back who knows how many hundreds of years in the Lowcountry. I always loved the thick, pitted surface of tabby; it looks as if it could stand for millennia, and may well do so. The tabby and the now-matured plantings are, to me, the only things that save the guest house from a rather daunting institutionality, which may be why the rich Spartanburgers sold it after the first year, though local legend says that it is because an alligator came out of the creek and ate the wife’s Yorkie and was going for the youngest child as dessert before the screams from the children drove the sensible beast back into the water.

  I always try to cram as many big, loose, rowdy bouquets as I can into the bedrooms and common areas, to soften the look of an upscale Elks Hall. Today the back of my Cherokee was almost full of them.

  Clay helped me take the pails and vases into the kitchen and did not make a move to leave, but I knew that he was at least an hour past his customary time for going to his office, so I said, “Why don’t you go on and catch up? I’ll finish this up and then I think I’ll walk over to Lottie’s. She’s starting a humongous new thing of the lighthouse that I want to see. I’ll probably have some lunch with her, too. What time are your chickens coming in?”

  “The two couples should be in about two. I think the woman…you know, the black woman…is getting in an hour or so later. Hayes is going over to Charleston to pick her up; the others are renting a car. Did I tell you that she’s got a child with her?”

  “Oh, Clay, no, you didn’t. How old a child? She’s surely going to need a sitter, isn’t she? Or do you think she’ll even want to go out and leave it? What is it, by the way?”

  “A boy. I think she said he was five or six. Yeah, I guess she’ll want a sitter. Can you leave them with sitters at five? I don’t remember…”

  “Just,” I said. “But she may not want to. I’ll pick up a few things for a light supper for her and the little boy in case she wants to stay here and bring them over after lunch. I want to put some breakfast things in the fridge for everybody, anyway. Lord, I hope I can get somebody at this late date. There’s an awful lot going on around the island this time of year.…”

  “Don’t you bother with that; I’ll get somebody in human resources to do it. There’s a list over there. It’s what they’re for.”

  “No, I’ll do it this time. I know how I’d feel if I was coming to a new place with a small child. If all else fails maybe I can heavily bribe Estelle to do it. She was saying the other day she missed having her grandchildren at home now that Emily has moved to the mainland.”

  He kissed me on the forehead.

  “You okay now?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Don’t ever be sorry. Just don’t do that to yourself. That’s all I ask. Estelle’s right. It doesn’t…get us anywhere.”

  “I know.”

  He got into the Cherokee and drove away, and I filled vases and pitchers and set my riotous roses around, watching the stark rooms catch flame with them, and then I went out back and sat for a time on the low wall that bordered the veranda, looking west into the dull-pewter noonday dazzle toward “my” part of the island. From the dark line of the distant woods a pair of great, gawky birds rose into the air and lumbered away into the sun. Wood storks, I thought. They had been homing into the Ace Basin for some years from their historical habitats in Florida, because extensive development there has left them no home. Now, in all of the Carolina Lowcountry, they come only to the Ace. These, I thought, had been fishing one of the small freshwater ponds on the island and might be headed back to one of their rookeries. My grandfather had said, just before he died, that he thought there were perhaps three of them.

  He had died seven years earlier, suddenly, because, as Kylie said seriously when we told her, “His heart attacked him.” He died on the porch of the marsh house, his empty coffee cup overturned beside him, sprawled half out of one of the old green-painted rockers. He had not been dead long; I had gone over because he had not answered the telephone that morning when I made the daily eight A.M. call that was as much to hear his voice as to check on him. His heart had been ailing slightly for so long that we no longer really worried about him. When I found him, and touched his face, it was not entirely cooled and his hand was still flexible.

  “Don’t go,” I whispered, tears starting down my face, but of course he had. All things considered, as Clay pointed out later, it was the place and the way he would have chosen, and after all, who of us could ask for more than that?

  “‘I know,’” I quoted at him, trying to smile, “‘but I am not resigned.’” Clay was my husband and my love, but my grandfather had been the armature of my life. For a time after that, I felt tremulous, too tall on the earth, vulnerable to all the winds that blew. I think I feel so secure on the island now because it seems to me that part of him is still there.

  We married in 1974, almost two years after we met. I think if I had not accepted Clay’s proposal my grandfather would have seen to it with a shotgun. There was never a time, even after the Plantation was in full development over on the shore and Peacock’s Island was alive with home-owners and guests, that he did not admire Clay. He probably loved him, but in his world men did not speak of that, and so he never said. I know that he loved me, and Carter, and most of all Kylie, for he said so once or twice, shyly and gruffly, usually after a shot or two of Wild Turkey. The only time I ever saw him in a suit was at our wedding, in the Presbyterian church in Columbia that my mother and stepfather attended. That he wore the suit surely spoke of love; that he came at all to Columbia, a city he loathed, to attend a wedding grandiosely funded by a man he loathed equally but silently, spoke more of it. He never mentioned his own son to me, the father I did not remember, and somehow I never asked him. I know that my father died well before I met Clay Venable, of the familial coronary disease that later killed my grandfather, in a small town in southern Colorado, but no one thought to tell me much more than that. My mother would not speak of him, either. By the time I felt that I should pursue the other half of my biology, if only for the appearance of things, it hardly seemed worth the effort. Shortly before she died, my mother gave me some letters from him to her that she had saved for many years, but I have not yet read them. My main men, as the kids say, are both here on this island. My grandfather’s ashes are now a part of the ancient salt blood of the Ace; I scattered them from the dock on a still gray morning in early spring, when the marshes were just greening up.

  On the day that we married he deeded the entire island over to Clay.

  “It’s really yours,” he said to me, “but I didn’t want you to have to worry about taxes and all that stuff. Clay will take the kind of care of it I would, or you would. I’ve seen the plan for the development over on the ocean, and I got to say it looks good to me. No sense thinking we could keep this island to ourselves much longer, and I’d rather Clay looked after opening it up than anybody I know of. He’s going to keep what he calls the spirit of it, and that’s all I care about. I ain’t a fool; I put a line or two in the agreement that says if he’s ever stupid enough to run off with his secretary, or if he kicks the bucket before you do, it reverts to you. But if that doesn’t suit you, he and I will redo the agreement.”

  “No, it’s perfect,” I said, weeping into his neck with love for him and the magnificence of his wedding gift to us. “I don’t want to change a thi
ng.”

  But I found that ultimately, I did. I found that for a long time after he died I simply could not cross the flimsy little bridge from Peacock’s to the island without getting a great, cold lump in my throat, and I could not bring myself to stay in the marsh house very long, or go with Clay in the Whaler out into the heart of the marshes. I could not go over to the little settlement of Dayclear without crying silently, and the sight of the obdurate, mud-encrusted little marsh ponies bolting noisily over a hummock moved me to sobs. The void my grandfather left on the island whistled in my heart, the emptiness filled and choked me.

  After a time Clay grew impatient with me.

  “What good does it do for us to own it if you never want to go over there again?” he said one night, as I moved silently around the kitchen getting dinner. We had tried again with the island, taking the two children over for an afternoon, and once again I had stayed behind, huddled silently on the sunny dock. “What would make it all right for you?”

  And without thinking at all, without even realizing I spoke, I said, “I want the island. I want that part of it. I want it to be mine, in my name. I don’t know why, but I do. It’s like…he’ll come back, then.”

  He hugged me silently, and two days later he came back from a trip into Charleston and said, “Now it is yours. I had it transferred to you. Come on by the office and I’ll have Linda witness your signature. You now own fifteen thousand acres of swamp, a herd of mangy ponies, and a town full of Gullahs.”

  “Oh, no,” I said in horror. “I don’t own Dayclear! I don’t want it; that’s awful! You can’t own a town! He never owned Dayclear; he’s told me a thousand times that he thought old Mr. what’s-his-name deeded those houses over there to the Gullahs way before he left him the island.”

  “Well, there’s not a scrap of paper anywhere to that effect that I could find,” Clay said, “but it may be true. Trying to get clear title would be a nightmare, but then I don’t guess you’re planning to sell it, are you?”

  “Of course not,” I said, running into his arms. “Thank you, darling! I know it shouldn’t matter, but somehow I just…needed it. And you’ve still got by far the biggest part, the part you really wanted, don’t you?”

  “Of course. If you’re happy, I’m happy. Now, you think you can go back over there without crying on the dock?”

  “Yes,” I said, and from that day, I could.

  I went back over the next day, by myself, and it was as if my grandfather had never left it, was simply off somewhere in the canoe, and I could move as easily about the house as I ever had. I drifted through it, straightening up, sweeping, dusting, making mental notes of everything that needed repairing and brightening, and then I went back out to the Cherokee and drove over to Dayclear.

  I had not gone to the village often without my grandfather. He was scrupulous about according the villagers their privacy, and I, spawn of the sixties and seventies, had the Southern liberal’s horror of appearing condescending to anyone with skin darker than my own. But I knew most of the old men and women living there, because I ran into them when I went with my grandfather to the scrubby little mom-and-pop store at the bridge or to the tiny post office. I knew which house Scrape Jackson had lived in, and that his son, elderly himself now, and ill with diabetes, still lived there, with his old wife and a rotating assortment of small grandchildren. Toby Jackson was usually to be found sitting out in front of the little unpainted house in an old armchair, covered with a paisley shawl that looked as if it might have once graced the shoulders of a fine lady or a grand piano on Tradd Street, weaving sweet-grass baskets and watching his chickens forage in the dusty yard. He was there that morning, and I stopped the car and got out and went over to him.

  “It’s Toby, isn’t it?” I said, smiling foolishly and wishing I had my grandfather’s natural ease with the Gullahs.

  He nodded his head slowly. I noticed that his eyes were filmed, as if with cataracts, and realized that he probably could not see me well, if at all.

  “Yes’m,” he said.

  “Toby, I’m Caroline Aubrey. Mr. Gerald’s granddaughter. We’ve met, but you probably don’t remember. I knew your daddy, though.…”

  “I remember,” Toby said.

  “Well, I guess you know Granddaddy died not too long ago.…”

  I paused, and he nodded.

  “…and I just wanted to let you know…let all of you know over here, I mean, that nothing’s changed, and nothing’s going to. This part of the island is mine, across the bridge over here, and I’m not sure what you all’s arrangement about the property here is, but I didn’t want anybody to worry that anyone would, you know, bother you about it or anything. It belongs to you all, just like it always did. It always will.”

  He did not speak but only nodded slowly. After a while I said, “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. It’s nice to see you again, Toby.”

  I had started back to the Cherokee, cheeks burning, when he called after me, “Miss Caroline?”

  I turned. “Yes?”

  “Thank you for telling us. I guess we been kind of wondering ever since Mr. Gerald passed. Couldn’t none of us prove we owns our houses, I don’t think, but they’s been ours for a long time.”

  My heart smote me.

  “Somebody should have come right away and talked to you. I’m so sorry.”

  He smiled for the first time. He had a large gold tooth in front, and his smile looked festive and sweet.

  “We figured you git around to it sooner or later. You his granddaughter, after all. We all thought a sight of Mr. Gerald. We sure did.”

  I sang in the Cherokee all the way back over the bridge to Peacock’s.

  After that, I was at the marsh house at least twice a week. After school and in the summers, Kylie and sometimes Carter came with me, though, like Clay, Carter gravitated eastward to the ocean like an iron filing to a magnet. It was Kylie who became my eventual companion on the marshes. They sang to her as they never did to Clay and Carter. She was especially enchanted with the ponies. One, a cobby, dun-colored mare of astonishing stupidity and passing equine sweetness, took to following her around, doglike, for the lumps of sugar Kylie kept in her pockets.

  “You’ll ruin her teeth,” I used to say, and we would laugh, because the mare’s long yellow teeth seemed impervious to everything from sugar to dynamite. We named her Pianissimo, for obvious reasons. I still see her sometimes, though never again so close as when Kylie came with me to the island.

  At nine-thirty that evening I sat at a round table in the quiet patio room of Carolina’s, listening to the conversation between Clay and his new cadets and sipping on my third glass of Merlot. Ordinarily I do not drink at these shakedown cruises, as Hayes Howland calls them, but tonight’s was going so badly that by the time our appetizers came I could not bear the slogging tedium and the Herculean effort of trying to draw the young wives of the anointed into the conversation, and when Hayes, who had joined us, ordered a bottle of Merlot and put it down on the table between us, I simply gave up and drank each glass he poured for me. Clay was still toying with his first glass of wine when we waited for dessert, and the young men were sipping matter-of-factly and moderately, as if they did not realize they were drinking wine at all, hanging on to Clay’s words, but the two young women were not drinking at all, and simply would not be either assimilated or consoled. After an hour of trying himself, Hayes had raised an eyebrow at me and murmured, “À votre sante,” and settled silently into the wine, and I had given up and leaned back and joined him. Clay passed me a level look or two, but when I lifted my shoulders in an almost imperceptible shrug and raised my glass to him, he did not look again. I knew that I had broken my end of the bargain—to engage and draw out the women while he began spinning their husbands into the cocoon of the company—but I was bone-tired and annoyed with them all, and wished suddenly for nothing so much as to be safely in the marsh house on the island and not required to speak another word until tomorrow. The morning in
Kylie’s room had bled me more deeply than I had thought. And my afternoon encounter with the young black woman Clay had hired had made me both angry and bored, a combination unbeatable for sheer enervation.

  I had stayed too long at Lottie’s studio, and by the time I got back to the house I barely had time to run out again to the little supermarket in the Plantation’s chic, lushly planted little mall for provisions for the guest house. When I got back to the Heron Marsh house it seemed as empty as when I had left it, and the kitchen was in its same pristine state, so I put my grocery bags down on the counter and was unloading them when a cool voice said, “I beg your pardon?”

  I looked around as guiltily as if I had been caught rifling the silverware. A tall young black woman stood in the door to the hallway. She wore a severely cut ivory linen pantsuit and simple gold jewelry, and was utterly beautiful; her skin was the color of coffee with a great deal of sweet cream in it, and her face looked like something on the wall of a highland African cave, newly come to light after millenna. She was not smiling. Her delicate brows were lifted high over almond eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I didn’t know anyone was here. Your plane must have been right on time.”

  “Are you the baby-sitter?” she said.

  I laughed.

  “No. I’m Caroline Venable, Clay’s wife. I wasn’t sure what you would want to do about dinner, whether or not you’d want to leave your little boy with a sitter, so I brought some things over for supper in case you wanted to stay in tonight. I know how it is the day you get in from a long trip.…”

  “Mark is fine with sitters,” she said levelly. “Mr. Howland said the company had them available. I’m sorry, I thought you must be someone he sent. He’s gone to the office to see about it.…”

  “Well, I’m afraid we weren’t able to do much on this short notice. This time of year is crammed full of things for the children. But my housekeeper said she’d be delighted to sit. She’s wonderful with children; she practically raised mine, and she has a raft of grandchildren herself.…”