Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I heard the hoofbeats while I stood, eyes still closed. It did not frighten me; I knew that it was the ponies. They had undoubtedly seen my lights and smelled my bagel, and were hoping for a handout. The Park Service maintained them nominally, but the Gullahs in Dayclear fed them biscuits and corn bread and whatever they had at hand, and so had my grandfather, adding grain in the winters, and the ponies had grown particular. I heard the stamping of hooves and an occasional snort and whicker, and I knew they would be grouped about the bottom of the steps up to the deck, waiting to see whether they would dine or would be forced to bolt. No one on the island mistreated or shooed them, that I was aware of, but sometimes they made a great, eye-rolling, hysterical show of fright and persecution, and went lumbering off in a pod as if ringmasters with chains were after them. There seemed to be no pattern to it. My grandfather always said, when they spooked and scattered like that, that they were simply bored, but Clay maintains that their brains are somehow smaller than those of normal horses, or that their synapses do not meet, or some such arcane genetic glitchiness. He does not care for the ponies. They trample grass and gardens and keep the shallow banks of the creek slick and muddy. And they leave their excrement everywhere.

  I inched my way down the steps, talking softly all the while so that they would know I was there. I finally saw them when I had almost reached the bottom step. A small puff of breeze, the little wind off the mainland that usually comes up in the afternoon, blew aside the curtain of fog, and there they stood, perhaps seven of them in a loose knot, staring patiently at the steps where they knew I would materialize.

  I do not know what they looked like originally, but they mostly look alike now, distinguishing characteristics blunted and buffed away by generations of inbreeding and the years in the subtropical wild. Now they are almost all a kind of taupish dun color, shaggy of coat and tangled of mane, with fat, hanging bellies from the rich marsh grass and the largesse of the islanders, and splayed, untrimmed hooves. Their coats are caked with the dust of their mud wallows in hot weather, when the slick odorous black mire is an effective fly and mosquito deterrent, and long and tattered like beggars’ coats in winter. Their heads are large in proportion to their stumpy legs, and there is usually some sort of rheumy effluvia stuck in the corners of their large, feminine brown eyes. They have long eyelashes, ridiculously like cocottes in a French farce, and pretty, curly mouths like a fairytale illustration of an Arabian stallion. They are a very long way from being handsome creatures, but there is a kind of tough, cocky competence to them, a chunky briskness, that pleases the eye. They have attitude. For some reason, the sight of them always makes me smile. When the group shifted and I saw emerging from its middle the little goblin shape of a colt, I laughed aloud. I had not seen a baby in the herd since I myself was small.

  One of the adults ambled out of the herd and stretched a stubby neck out toward my hand, and I opened it so that the sugar cube was visible. Long yellow piano-key teeth closed over the sugar and raked it none too daintily into a blacklipped mouth. Pianissimo. Nissy. And then the colt came scampering out, too, and bobbed its head against her flank and looked around her shoulder at me with huge, black-lashed eyes, and I both heard and felt my breath come out in a little puff of wonder and delight.

  “Oh, Nissy, you have a baby,” I breathed. “How pretty he…she?…is. What shall we call it? Oh, wouldn’t Kylie love this, though!”

  I fished in my pocket for more sugar and Nissy came closer and so did the colt, stretching its miniature neck out like its mother, ever so slowly, its head actually trembling with shyness and curiosity, and finally, delicately, it took the cube from my palm and crunched it, then wheeled and galloped away on its long, stillslender legs. Nissy swung her big head around to watch it, but she did not follow. The colt disappeared back into the body of the expectant herd. I threw a handful of cubes down on the ground and stepped back. Solemnly, not jostling and pushing as dogs or children would have done, the marsh tackies lipped up the sugar cubes, crunched them reflectively, waited a while until no more were forthcoming, and then, as if one of them had given a signal, wheeled and scampered clumsily away in one of their mock-panic attacks, snorting and whickering. The fog swallowed them almost immediately, and in another moment swallowed the sound of them. I was left standing on the bottom step surrounded by swirling white, with nothing for company but the memory of them and another memory that bobbed to the surface of my mind like a cork, bobbled there tantalizingly for a moment, and then lay still and whole in my head.

  Another day of such fog, long ago, almost the only time I remembered a fog like this one, for we did not come to the island so often in winter. There was too much going on on Peacock’s for the children then. But for some reason we were here, Kylie and I, in a chilly, silent white fog like this one, she perhaps five or six, still tiny in her yellow slicker, waiting for my grandfather to finish whatever he was doing in his bedroom and come and take us crabbing over on Wassimaw Creek. I would not have taken the boat out in such weather, but he knew every inch of all the island’s waterways by heart, and knew that almost no one else would have a boat out. It was, he had said the night before, a fine day for crabbing. So we waited, and Kylie chafed. I usually let her run free on the island, but not in fog like this.

  Kylie had no fear. You needed a little, sometimes.

  The phone rang, and I went into the kitchen to answer it and talked for quite a while to Clay, who was leaving on a trip to New York and could not find his cuff links. When I hung up, Kylie was gone.

  My grandfather came out then, and together we went out into the white nothingness, groping our way down the steps and across the grass to the edge of the marsh, which dropped a half-foot or so down from the hummock on which the grove and the house sat. Scarcely six inches, but the difference in terrain was dramatic. On the high ground, the earth was firm and level. On the marsh, it was ephemeral, trembling, not quite solid underfoot. Not precisely watery, or outright bog, but…not solid. When you could not see, as we could not on this day, the feeling was eerie, unsettling, as if you stayed on the surface of the earth only by its capricious sufferance. We called and called for her, hearing our voices stop short against a wall of fog, hearing nothing in return but the dripping from the old live oaks and the slap of the creek against the distant pilings of the dock. For the first five minutes or so I was very angry with her. On the sixth the fear came. By the time we had groped our way to the edge of the hundred-foot plank walkway that wound across the marsh to the creek, I was weak-kneed and nearly sobbing with fear.

  “She can’t have gotten far,” my grandfather said over and over. “She can’t be in any real trouble. If she’d fallen or something, we’d hear it.”

  “You can’t hear anything in this fog,” I quavered. “You can’t even hear the fog buoy.…”

  “You’d hear if she fell into the water,” he said sensibly. It did no good at all. I was halfway down the walkway when we did hear a noise. I stopped. It was the muffled thundering of the ponies coming up over the hummock from the opposite direction, behind the house on the high ground. Above it I could hear Kylie’s laughter. In the distorting fog, it seemed to come from everywhere around us and from far away, from nearby and nowhere.

  I was back on solid grass by the time the ponies materialized out of the mist, running hard. One of them was a good half-head in the lead. It was Pianissimo, and Kylie was on her back, bent low over the thick neck, hands woven into the straggly mane, clinging like a yellow-clad monkey. Kylie, laughing as hard and joyously as I have ever heard her laugh in her life.

  While I stood there, speechless with relief and anger, the pony set her stumpy legs and stopped abruptly, and Kylie half slid, half fell off her back, still laughing. By the time I reached her, Pianissimo had lumbered away, back into the fog with the other ponies. I could hear them as they trotted along the line of the hummock toward the distant maritime forest that often sheltered them, but I could no longer see them.

  Kylie was
properly chastened when my grandfather and I finished with her, but she was not repentant. She had, she said, seen the herd off at the edge of the copse while I talked on the phone and went to give them sugar, and they were so friendly, especially Pianissimo, that she just wanted to see if she could ride. Nissy, she said, had stood like a statue while she climbed onto her back, but then had taken off as if she had heard a shot.

  “I rode her all the way down the old deer path, Mama,” she said. “She can run like the wind, for a fat little old pony. It was…it was neat. Just me and her and the fog…and you could hear the others behind us. It was like we were leading them on a charge.”

  “Didn’t you hear us calling you?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “I did.”

  “Kylie, you know you have to come when I call you. That’s not negotiable. You agreed to that. How can I let you out of my sight if you don’t keep your word about that?”

  “I was, Mama,” she said. “I was coming faster this way than if I was on my own two legs. Lots faster.”

  She was right, technically, but I was not prepared to argue the point. I cut our visit short and we forwent the crabbing expedition and went back home to Peacock’s. She was disappointed, but she did not whine or cry. If Kylie deliberately disobeyed me, or did something she knew I would not have permitted, she took the consequences without a murmur. She simply fell in love with an idea, weighed the pleasure against the cost, did the deed with relish, and paid the price uncomplainingly. It was a very adult way to live a young life, all told. Except that the final price had been more than she could have imagined. More than I could have, too.

  I stood still on this morning, in the fog, thinking of that day, hearing again the thudding of the hooves of the herd, seeing again the flash of my daughter’s yellow slicker in the cottony nothingness. Fog and ponies and Kylie…

  Before I went out with my watercolors I called Clay at his office. Shawna, the office’s forty-year-old receptionist who has never married and thinks that she is married to Clay, said that he was out of the office until after lunch. She did not know where he had gone, but she had an idea it was into Charleston.

  “I hope he’s seeing a doctor finally, Mrs. Venable,” she said in the honeyed twang that puts my teeth on edge. Shawna is originally from New Jersey. The Lowcountry got her about the same time Clay did. She sounds as if she is chewing cape jessamine.

  “What on earth for?” I said, surprised and faintly alarmed.

  She was silent a moment, and then she said, “Well, nothing, really, I guess. It’s just that none of us think he’s been himself lately. You know, he’s just so distracted, and abrupt, and it’s as though he doesn’t really see you when you talk to him.…We just thought he ought to get a checkup. But of course if you haven’t noticed anything, then there’s nothing.…” She let her voice trail off. My own blindness and neglect were implicit in the dying syllables.

  “I think he’s just fine, Shawna,” I said briskly. “But thank you for worrying about him. If there’s anything amiss, I’m sure he’ll let us know. We had a pretty late night last night, with the new people coming in and all.…”

  “Of course,” she said. “He’s just tired. I keep telling him he ought to let somebody else take over those dinner things for the new people, but you know how he is.…”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, and thanked her and hung up smartly.

  Did I, though? Had Clay really been all those things—distant, abstracted, tired, unseeing—and I had not noticed? I thought back. He had been working very late in his home office for the past month or so, but he frequently did that when there was a new project in the wings. And he had been silent and gone away behind his Wall Street Journal or his clipboard in the mornings at breakfast, and to some extent at dinner, but when wasn’t he? Clay was not gregarious, not loquacious, not a mealtime gossip. He never had been, especially not since the Plantation companies had taken off like they had in the past four or five years, with new properties coming on line in half a dozen states and the Caribbean. Not since Kylie.

  Both of us had been, to some extent, gone away since then. I had been content to have it so. I could not have borne the weight of a hovering, demanding relationship in those first few precarious months and years. I did not think he could have, either. It was as if we had had an agreement: when the time is right, when the healing is further along, we will come all the way back to each other. We will know when. There is no hurry.

  But there had been no agreement. I had just assumed he felt as I did. I shook my head and went on out into the day. I would call again after lunch, and tonight at dinner we would talk about it. Finally, we would talk. I could not abide the thought that he was unhappy and alone with it.

  The fog lifted about noon, and the sun fell so heavily on the windless marsh and creek that I was soon hot and sweat-slicked, and shucked my jacket and tied it around my waist. With the fog gone, my morning’s pursuit of fog-sculpted vignettes vanished, too, and the glare off the water began to give me a headache. I trudged back to the house and put on a T-shirt, exchanged the watercolors for my camera, made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and took everything out to the Boston Whaler that bobbed at the dock. We had not yet put it away for the winter; there had been no real winter on the island, and there probably would be none. I could remember days in January and February out on the water, with the sun burning face and forearms and only a chill edge to the wind to remind you that the soft Lowcountry winter had teeth and could bare them if it chose. But it rarely did. Only occasionally did we get a slicking of sleet or ice, and only once in my lifetime did snow fall on Peacock’s and the island. But it had been a spectacular snow, drifting up to eight or nine inches and lingering for three or four days. Snow on palms and Spanish moss…everyone had taken photos of it, to send to family and friends off-island.

  I took the boat down Alligator Alley to Wassimaw Creek and over to the inland waterway, to photograph the steel winter light there. But the sky was too milky for much contrast, and there was a softening in the distance that spoke of returning fog. So I cut the motor and threw out the little anchor and let the Whaler drift. I ate my sandwich and drank the Diet Coke I had brought along, and then I stretched out on the backseat and pulled the Atlanta Braves cap that belonged to everyone and no one over my eyes and drowsed. There must have been virtually no traffic on the waterway; I saw none, and heard none, for the entire time that I was there. But for much of that time I was fast asleep, and when I woke, the fog was just reaching its succubus’s fingers out to pat my face, and the heat was gone from the day. A solid white bank lay over the Inland Waterway, and I knew that it would drift up the creeks and estuaries until it swallowed the entire island. I pulled up the anchor and started the engine and putted for home. I was not worried about the fog, but I was cold in just the T-shirt, and I had a neck ache from sleeping with my head tilted forward against the stern. I wanted hot coffee and a shower before I left for Peacock’s. More than that, I wanted not to leave for Peacock’s at all. The island had done its work while I slept, and I felt washed and lightened and eased. There would undoubtedly be some sort of additional welcome ceremonies for the new people this evening, and I simply did not feel like wasting this beneficence on them.

  “Please let them all have previous engagements,” I whispered to the whitened sky, though what engagements they might have there among the alien corn I could not imagine. But when I got back to the house the answering machine light was blinking, and I picked it up to hear Clay’s voice telling me that he and Hayes had to go to Atlanta on the spur of the moment and that the human resources people were baby-sitting the newcomers tonight.

  “So stay another day or so, if you want to,” he said. “I don’t know how long we’ll be. There are some money people who made some time for us earlier than we thought. I’ll call you either there or at home when I know where we’re staying and when we’ll be back. Or I’ll let Shawna know. Take care.”

  He did not say, “I lo
ve you,” as he sometimes did. He was using his flat, intense, strictly business voice. He did not use it for endearments. I would not have had it so. I thought that the money people must be pretty important. My heart lifted. I could stay on the island. Clay would not miss me in this mood.

  I had my shower and built a fire and put on a tape of Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea. It was an old recording; it had been my grandfather’s. Oddly, he had loved the cool, improvisational West Coast jazz of the late fifties and sixties, and I had transferred a lot of his old records to tape for him. I loved this one, too. Perfect fog music. I made a pot of coffee and rooted around in the bookcase among the yellowing, damp-warped books and magazines for something I had not read recently. I settled on Kon-Tiki, another favorite of my grandfather’s, and curled up on the spavined sofa to lose myself at sea.

  An hour or so must have passed when I heard the ponies again. The fog-flattened sound of their hooves pulled me back from the wastes of the Pacific, and I shook my head for a moment, not quite knowing where I was. Then I smiled and got up and went out onto the deck to see if I could spot Pianissimo and her colt again.

  The fog was blowing, spinning fast in the circle of yellow light from the overhead porch light. A brisk wind from off the ocean meant that it would be clear later tonight, and there would be a sky pricked full of icy stars. In the swirling skeins I caught glimpses of the herd, moving restlessly around the support posts of the house. It was not full dark, but it would be in fifteen or twenty more minutes.

  I went back for sugar cubes and then walked slowly down the steps, clicking my tongue.

  “You here, Nissy?” I called softly. “Want some sugar? Come on, bring that baby up here and let’s have a look at him. Or her.”