A dark shape came out of the fog: Nissy, sure enough, with the colt close on her flank. I stretched out my hand with the sugar cube, and that’s when I saw the child.
She stood off at the edge of the pale orb of porch light, perhaps thirty feet away, still as a statue, staring at me. Her head and shoulders were fairly distinct, but from her waist down she was lost in fog. I got the impression of a small brown face and great dark eyes that fastened intently on me, and a headful of dark curls with fog droplets clinging to them. She wore a yellow rain slicker. She looked to be about five or six, maybe seven. A small seven. She made no noise at all, and she did not move.
I did not, either. I could not have. My heart began to thunder, pounding so hard that I could hear only it and my blood, roaring in my ears. If she had spoken, I could not have heard her. But she did not speak. My knees and thighs and wrists turned to water. It seemed to me that only the powerful heartbeat held me up, that I hung from it like a marionette.
Nissy whickered and stamped her hoof, and I held out my hand toward the child as slowly as if to a wild creature.
“Who are you?” I meant to say.
“Is it you?” came out of my mouth, a crippled whisper.
The child turned and bolted. The fog took her before she had gone four paces. I could hear her footsteps for a bit before they were lost in the cottony whiteness. I thought she ran back around the house and toward the dirt road leading into the hummock where the house stood.
I could not make my legs go after her. In the space of a minute, I was not sure she had been there at all. I felt sweat break out in huge, cold drops on my forehead and at my hairline, and sat down heavily on the bottom step. I sat there until the ponies moved away, and then there was nothing but fog and silence and the yellow pool of light from the porch. And still I sat there.
Presently I got up and went up the steps, as stiffly as if I were very old or had been badly beaten, and into the house. I went to the closet where the cleaning supplies were kept. From behind a cardboard grocery carton of toilet paper I took a bottle of Wild Turkey. There were three of them there; they had been there since my grandfather died. I would not have thought I even remembered them. But my fingers did, and my blood. I took the bottle and a glass and sat back down before the dying fire and began to drink. I drank, not moving from the couch, until I passed out. It was not the first time that had happened, but it had not happened many times, and never in this place. One of the last things I remember thinking was, I’ve broken all my covenants now.
The first waking moments of a bad hangover are a time when all things are possible. Reality is canceled; it does not yet prevail. There is only, for the first instant, a purity of being, an utter, bodiless awareness. The body will get its licks in almost instantly, of course: the dry, knife-edged throat and lips, the pounding sinuses, the first roilings of the abused and mutinous stomach. Hard on their heels will come the sickly, slithering feet of the great shame and fragmented memories of the night before, sliding in like dirty water under a shut door.
But that first moment: that is pure Zen. Nothing is closed to you. Nothing is past and nothing is ahead; everything is now.
When I woke on the sofa in front of the dead fire the next morning, there was only me and the child I had seen the night before. That was the great, ultimate reality of my life in this moment. It remained only to decide what to do about it.
I lay without moving, eyes still closed, letting sensation seep in bit by bit under the great, white knowledge that enclosed me: stiff, cold limbs, pounding head, killing thirst, a great pressure on my bladder, a great pressure waiting to crush my soul. I pushed them all back; they could and would wait. Until I opened my eyes, until I moved, the child from last night was the one real thing, the one true thing, in my universe.
I remember clearly thinking: Madness is waiting for me. I can choose it or not. If I choose the child, I choose the madness. If I don’t, I can have my life back like it was. I don’t have to decide until I open my eyes. But I will have to decide then.
I lay still, eyes closed, not moving, reaching out to her with my mind and my heart and all of my being. I heard the morning wind start up in the live oak that hung over the deck and the first grumpy twitter of the anonymous little songbirds that lived there. A part of my mind noted that it must be very early. The light felt pearly on my lids. Everything in me called to her. I did not move.
I heard the ponies then. They came chuffing and trotting over the hummock from behind the house; I could hear them clearly. Their hooves had depth and resonance. I knew that the fog had gone. I waited.
And I heard her. I heard her small feet thudding after the ponies, coming closer, coming from the east, the direction of the road. I heard her laugh. It was a giggle: silvery, delighted, unafraid. And I heard her voice. It was the pure, generic piping of childhood: it could have belonged to any child.
Any child at all.
“Here, baby,” she called.
Choose, my heart said, and I chose. I opened my eyes. I got up and ran lightly across the floor and out onto the deck, tiptoeing, heart bursting, lips curving in a smile that was only a remembered shape on my mouth. If this was madness, I thought, then I embrace it, now and forever. Oh, if this is madness, let it never lift.…
I started down the steps and stopped. She was there, looking up at me as she had last night, still wearing the yellow slicker. She did not move.
She was not my child. She was no one’s child I had ever seen. In the clear, opalescent light of early morning a stranger’s child stood there, poised for flight, dark eyes wary but not frightened, feet and legs bare under the too-big slicker, taking my measure as handily as she took my heart and turned it to frozen lead. She did not speak again. From behind the house, I heard the ponies begin to move back toward the road.
A man came around the side of the house then. He was not tall, but he was stocky and heavy-shouldered, tanned almost black and with a great bush of wiry, gray-streaked black hair. He stopped and looked at me; his eyes were hers, the child’s.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anybody was here,” he said. “My granddaughter was chasing the ponies and got away from me. I hope we didn’t scare you.”
I simply looked at him. It seemed to me, in that dead moment, that no one and nothing would ever scare me again.
5
I sat down abruptly on the steps and looked at him. My legs and arms and, when I looked down, my hands, were trembling, a shivering so fine that it was hardly visible, but profound for all that. I was as weak as if I had been ill for a long time. It struck me that I had spent a lot of time, all told, sitting on these steps. The thought might have made me smile another time. I could not have smiled now, with my trembling lips and numb face. It was all I could do to focus on him.
He came closer, frowning slightly.
“We did scare you. You’re shaking all over,” he said. His voice was rich and deep, plummy, almost a theatrical voice. There was a note in it that was somehow foreign, though he spoke with no discernible accent. There were deep grooves in the leathery brown face, between his heavy, gray-spiked eyebrows, running from his brown avian beak of a nose to his wide mouth, radiating from the corners of his eyes. A well-used face. His crown of wild hair would have brushed the collar of his blue work shirt if it had fallen straight, but it foamed and frizzed in the heavy fog-humidity into an exuberant afro. It made his head look too large even for the thick torso. I thought distractedly of a portrait of the Minotaur I had seen in a book of Greek legends once. I thought also of an aging hippie. The work shirt was knotted at his waist and exposed a tangle of gray chest hair with a medallion of some sort on a chain buried in it, and there was a flower in the top buttonhole, a drooping camellia. His blue jeans were bleached nearly white and frayed at the hem, and his feet were bare. Unlike the rest of him, they were neat and small.
He was no one I had ever seen and bore little resemblance to anyone who ordinarily came to Peacock’s and the island, an
d it occurred to me that perhaps I should be afraid of him, but I was not. I was sick, depleted, utterly numb, and vaguely angry at him. Or, at least, I knew that I would be angry, when I could feel much of anything. Mainly, I simply wanted him to be gone, him and his intruding granddaughter.
“You didn’t scare me,” I said dully. “I thought for a minute the little girl was someone else. But you should know that you’re on private property. I own this house and land. And I’m not feeling very well, so if you wouldn’t mind I really think—”
“I wanted to see the horses,” the child said in a clear treble voice. “There is a baby, Grandpapa.”
He did not move, but his face went bone white and then flushed a dark red. He drew in a great breath and let it out again on a long sigh. He turned his face to the child, and tears welled in his black eyes, and his face seemed almost to crumple.
“Tell me about the baby, Lita,” he said very softly. He was still staring at her; he did not turn to me. I thought at first he must have had some sort of an attack, a stroke or something, but then I could see that he was flooded with strong emotion of some sort, almost to the point of open weeping. I opened my mouth to ask them to leave. Slowly, I shut it again. The thought of this massive, dark man weeping on my doorstep was somehow more than I could bear to even contemplate. I hoped that, if I were still and silent, he would regain his control and go away and take his changeling with him. Then I could sit in the pale lemon sunlight of a Lowcountry autumn and see if there was a way to go on with this day and this life.
The child did not speak again. He turned his head to me finally. His face was relatively composed now, though the tears had overflowed his eyes and ran down his face into the chasms on either side of his mouth.
“She has not spoken in a very long time,” he said. “The doctors weren’t sure that she ever would again. I hope you’ll forgive the sloppy tears. It’s a happy moment for me.” His face was happy, incandescently so, almost foolishly so. It was the face of a large, giddy child, rapt and open. I had seen no faces like this on any man I had met before. Most men learn early to shield the force of their loves from strangers. A tongue of sympathy and interest curled in my heart in the midst of all the aridity, infinitely small and alien.
“She spoke this morning, too, before you came,” I said. “I heard her. She said, ‘Here, baby.’ And last night I heard her. I think maybe those doctors didn’t know what they were talking about.”
He looked from me to the child. She looked solemnly back at him. She had a strange little face, very brown and sharply triangular, with a small pointed chin and enormous dark eyes. Under the cap of lustrous black curls, it looked almost medieval, the face of a Florentine child on a triptych.
“She was not here last night,” he said to me, still looking at her. “She was asleep in our house. I put her to bed myself. You must have heard something else.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, smiling at the child. “It was you last night, wasn’t it? With the horses, in the fog?”
She smiled a tiny, formal little smile, but she did not break her silence.
“Were you here last night, Estrellita?” her grandfather asked her, very seriously. “Did you slip away and come looking for the ponies?”
She looked at me, and then down at her bare dirty feet, and then up at him.
“Sí, Abuelo,” she whispered.
He did not say anything for a long time, only looked down at her. I saw that he was once again struggling to contain the tears, and turned my face away. I was very tired, and once more wished that they would go, whoever they were. I wanted no part of their epiphanies.
He turned to me then, briskly, and took the child’s hand. “We’ll be on our way,” he said. “We didn’t mean to bother you. She thinks the ponies hung the moon, but she’s never run away after them before, and she’s certainly never spoken of them. I’ll see that she stays closer to home from now on.”
They turned to go.
“Wait,” I said. They turned back.
“Who are you?” I said. “Who is she? Where do you live? How did you get all the way out here? Why has she not spoken for so long?”
He laughed aloud, a raucous, unfettered sound. Across the copse in the thick pine woods a flock of crows answered him, making almost the same sound. The child laughed, too.
“My name is Lou,” he said. “Lou Cassells. This is Estrellita Esteban, my granddaughter. We’re living at the moment over in Dayclear, up at the other end of the island. I’m working around there, and she’s spending the summer with me. She has not spoken since her mama died three years ago. That was back in Cuba, where our family comes from. Her mama died in their house in the mountains, in childbirth. There was no one with her but Estrellita. The new baby was born dead, and Estrellita’s mother died after two days. Lita was still at their side when they found her. It was almost too late; she was badly dehydrated, and she had not had food for days. She did not speak after that until…now. That we know of, anyway.”
“My God,” I whispered. It was literally incomprehensible to me that there was still a place in the world, especially so close to my world, where women and babies died alone in childbirth and small children starved beside them, waiting for help that did not come. How could this be? An old pain, sharp and terrible, that I thought I had buried forever, tore at my heart. I put out my hand jerkily, as if it moved by itself, and touched the black curls, then dropped it at my side.
“How did that happen?” I said softly and fiercely. “How in the world could you let that happen?”
His face closed. It looked like a Toltec mask, severe and blunt and empty.
“Her father was dead. Her mother stayed on at the farm in the mountains because the baby was so nearly due; she could not travel. There were no close neighbors. Everyone had gone. It is very poor back in those mountains. Most of Cuba is very poor. I could not prevent it. I have not been back to Cuba in almost forty years. I cannot go back. I would be arrested.”
“I’m sorry,” I said miserably. “I spoke out of turn. It must have been awful for you. Was her father your son?”
“Her mother was my daughter.”
We were both silent then. I looked at him across a sea of troubles that for once were not my own. It looked uncrossable. I was ashamed.
“Please come into the house and have some coffee with me,” I said. “And I think there’s a jelly doughnut in the freezer. Maybe by that time the ponies will come back and we can see the baby.”
I smiled at the child and she smiled back, a fuller smile this time.
“Her mother’s name is Pianissimo,” I said. “My daughter named her when she was about your age. It’s because she has big yellow teeth like a piano.”
The child laughed aloud, a liquid gurgle of pleasure, and her grandfather smiled. I did, too, surprising myself.
“If she comes back maybe you can help me think of a name for her baby,” I said. “Meanwhile, let me show you my house. I used to come here to the island to visit my grandfather, too, and this is where he lived. My name is Caroline Venable, but you can call me Caro.”
The little girl made the shape of my name with her lips, but silently, “Caro.” The man stopped and stared at me, and then laughed again, with surprise and, I thought, pleasure. This was a man, obviously, to whom laughter and tears and who knew what else came naturally and were not reined in.
“Mrs. Venable,” he said. “I’ve heard of you, but I thought you’d be…older, I guess. I knew we’d meet sooner or later, though. I’m working for your husband.”
I stopped and looked back at him, surprised. He was definitely not the sort of man who usually came to the Plantation to work for Clay.
“You work for the company?” I said. “For Clay?”
“Not really,” Lou Cassells said. “This is a one-time-only deal, I think. I’m doing some landscape consulting for him. For the project over at Dayclear.”
I stared at him.
“It’s named for the Gullah se
ttlement up at the other end,” he said, mistaking my silence for ignorance. “You know, where the little houses are, and the old people. That’s to be the center of it, so that’s what your husband is calling it for now. Clay, yes. Privately I call him Mengele. I’m hoping to charm you thoroughly enough so you won’t tell him.”
Still I did not speak.
“If that was out of line, I apologize,” he said, his face changing. “More than one person has told me my tongue is going to get me into bad trouble. Again.”
I held up my hand, shaking my head.
“No. I mean, no, I don’t mind you calling him Mengele. Well, I do, I just…I wasn’t aware that there was a property planned for Dayclear. It’s way back on the river, in the middle of the marsh.…Why would anybody want to make a…project…of it? How could they, if they did?”
He shrugged. “I thought you would know about it. I hope I’m not the bearer of bad news for you. Actually, it will make a beautiful…ah, property, as you say. The river is deep and wide and navigable there. Good natural basin for a marina. It would be simple to dredge the rest. I don’t know, I only work there. Mengele…Clay…hired me to do a landscape workup, see what would grow there, what plants to keep, what to take out, what to import. It’s my specialty. I have a master’s degree in subtropical botany from Cornell. Please don’t bad-mouth me to your husband; this is miles above working as a disc jockey in a twenty-megahertz rock ’n’ roll station out Wappoo Creek Road. That was my last job.”
I turned and went on up the stairs. They followed me. The hangover bell jar of detachment and torpor descended again. I pushed the thought of the development at Dayclear outside it. I would deal with it later; there was, of course, some mistake. This man had his facts wrong. It would be easy for a casual employee to do that. He probably meant that Clay was using the settlement and the land around it as a model for a marsh property he was developing somewhere else. The vegetation would be virtually the same. I would straighten this out with Clay when he got back from Atlanta. There was simply no sense borrowing trouble. Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof. It was something I had learned, and learned well, in the long days after Kylie died. I was good at it.
Low Country Page 11
