Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  I sat them down on the sofa before the fireplace and lit the half-burned logs, and they leaped into life. The fire felt good. With the clearing of the fog had come fresh, stinging cold air from the west. I thought that we were done, now, with the last soft, wet traces of the Lowcountry Indian summer.

  The child sat quietly while I made coffee, but then her curiosity got the best of her and she got up and began to roam around the house. She picked things up and examined them and set them down again, very gently, looking at me as for permission. Her grandfather said something to her in soft, rapid Spanish and she stopped and clasped her hands behind her, but I said, “No, let her look. There’s nothing here she can hurt. It’s all childproof. I did the very same thing, and so did my daughter.…”

  He spoke again, and Estrellita went back to her solemn examining. He got up and came into the kitchen, where I was getting mugs down from the rack beside the stove and pouring milk, and leaned against the refrigerator.

  “This is a good house,” he said. “It feels lived and loved in, and it looks just like it should. It honors the marsh.”

  I smiled.

  “That’s a good way of putting it,” I said. “I think it does, too. My grandfather would have liked to hear that.”

  “He’s gone then.”

  “Yes. For several years now. But sometimes it seems to me that he’s still here, in this house and in the marsh.…”

  I fell silent, reddening. Now he would think that Mengele’s wife was some sort of New Age fruitcake, though why I cared what he thought I could not have said.

  “Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it?” he said. “Odd and good, how our dead stay with us sometimes, if we are very lucky. I often feel my daughter close, though I did not see her after she was very small, smaller even than this one here. I wish I could feel my wife, but she does not come. Ah, well. She never did want to leave Cuba. Why should she leave it now?”

  I shot him a swift look. He was smiling gently, as if the memory of his wife was a warm, quiet one.

  “She’s gone, too?” I said.

  “She died two years ago, in Havana. She had been raising Lita. One of my Miami relatives was able to arrange to get the child out for me. I don’t know what would have happened to her otherwise. I’m very grateful.”

  He spoke so matter-of-factly of his unimaginable life that it put me at ease. Somehow I thought he had learned to do that so that his American friends, so unused to this sort of tragedy, would not be smitten with guilt and pity. It was a graceful thing to do. I liked him for it.

  I handed him a cup of coffee.

  “I’m not going to pry into your life, but I wish you’d tell me how you got to the South Carolina Lowcountry. That trip must be some kind of story.”

  “One day,” he said, smiling so that the crinkles fanned out from his eyes. “One day I’ll do that. But I want to hear about you now. You already know a lot about me. Turnabout is fair play.”

  We sat down on the sofa in front of the fire. Lita had gone out onto the deck and was swinging on the low branch of the live oak that curved over it, shawled in silvery Spanish moss. I knew that it was sturdy enough for her slight weight. It had borne mine, and later Carter’s, and Kylie’s.

  “It’s awfully tame compared to yours,” I said. “I’d bore you to sleep.”

  I did not want to talk about myself. In fact, now that I had invited them in and settled them down, I wanted, perversely, for them to be gone again. The hangover and the shame and the accompanying uneasy fatigue surged back full bore. I wanted simply to lie down on the sofa and go back to sleep.

  He seemed to sense my hesitation.

  “Another time we’ll meet and swap stories, maybe,” he said. “I think you’re tired, and you said you weren’t feeling well. We need to get back, anyway. I don’t think my hosts know where we are.”

  He started to get up. A thought struck me.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why do you call him Mengele? Clay?”

  He grinned. It was white and wolfish, framed in the dark skin. It was also the grin of a havoc-minded, completely unrepentant small boy, and I had to smile back.

  “Well, number one, I’m Jewish, and I have a very well-developed sense of both paranoia and history. When somebody threatens me, I automatically think of Josef Mengele. Number two, those amazing blue eyes. They look at you as though he’s wondering what would happen if he connected your liver up to your kidneys, whether you’d piss bile or what. No other reason. He’s been a perfect gentleman to me.”

  “But he threatens you.…”

  “Not so much me. Just…oh, shit, I don’t know. Maybe nobody. For all I know he raises Persian kittens and butterflies in his spare time. It’s just that I’ve seen eyes like that in photographs from Nuremberg. Haven’t you ever thought how…extraordinary they are?”

  “They are that,” I said. “But I never found them threatening. Intense, maybe.”

  A stronger surge of nausea flooded through me, and the fine trembling came back, and I leaned my head back and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them he was looking at me gravely and the smile was gone.

  “This is none of my business,” he said. “But I think you ought to let me put a drop of bourbon in that coffee. I know a hangover when I see one. You feel like death. It’ll help, if you don’t have any more.”

  I started to protest, and then simply did not. I felt too badly, and there was something disarming about this man. He did not intimidate me in any way, despite the piratical skin and hair and the big Chiclet teeth. I suddenly did not care what he knew about me.

  “How’d you know bourbon was my drink?” I said dreamily.

  “Well, for one thing, I smelled booze on you when we first met. For another, there’s a half-empty bottle of it just under the coffee table. And for still another, it was my drink, too, and I’d know the smell of good bourbon anywhere, even if I haven’t tasted it for eight long years. I’ve been where you are. It feels damned awful. A little hair of the dog is not a bad thing, if you stick to one. After that I think you ought to go home. It doesn’t do to be by yourself with a bad hangover. Is there somebody there to look after you?”

  I thought of my vast, beautiful, empty house in Peacock Island Plantation.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll do that. I think I’ll skip the hair of the dog, though.”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he said softly, “I think you’re lying, but I’ve been there and done that, too. Just promise me you’ll go on home and we’ll be on our way. Your daughter, is she in school? You want to be there when she gets home.…”

  “My daughter is dead,” I said, still wrapped in the peace of the bell jar. “She drowned five years ago. She would be fifteen now. I thought your granddaughter…for a minute, last night, she looked very like my daughter at that age. She used to chase the ponies, too.”

  “Ay, Dios,” he said softly after a long while. “I’m sorry. Lita must have been an awful shock for you. I’ll see to it that she doesn’t come again.”

  “No. She’s a nice child. And the ponies are obviously helping her. Later, maybe, another day, you can bring her over and I’ll tell you where to find the baby and her mother. I think I know where they’re hanging out this fall. I can’t stop living. I don’t want to. She’s welcome here.”

  He got to his feet and went to the door and called to Lita to come in, it was time to go.

  “You are a very nice woman, Mrs. Caroline Venable,” he said. “I’m sorry if we brought any pain at all into your enchanted hideaway here. I think that you didn’t know about Dayclear, and I’ve shocked you badly, and as I say, I wish I could bite my tongue out, but I’m sure it would simply go on flapping. Your husband should have told you about it. You must talk with him about it now.”

  Anger flared from somewhere under the hangover. How dare this man, this perfect stranger, this hired employee of my husband’s, this trespasser, tell me what I must and must not do, or what Clay should have? I reco
gnized the anger for what it was: a mask for fear, but that did not lessen it. I sat up abruptly and glared at him.

  “I find that arrogant beyond belief,” I said coldly. “My…relationship with my husband is absolutely none of your affair. It never will be. And you are dead wrong about the new project. You’ve got your facts confused. There is no way Clay would start to develop this island without telling me first. There’s no way I wouldn’t know. For one thing, he doesn’t own this part of the island, I do. All of it, except for the settlement itself. And I’d never in this world permit such a thing. He knows that.”

  He looked at me silently for a long time, a level look suddenly as cold as my own. All the small-boy charm was gone from the brown face. I could almost feel the impact of the opaque black eyes. Uneasiness crept in over the anger. I did not know this man. How could I have forgotten that?

  “They’d like to know that over in Dayclear,” he said finally. “They’re really upset. They’re sure they’re going to lose their homes. It’s all they talk about, the old ones. There’s not anywhere else for most of them to go.”

  “They do know that,” I retorted. “Right after Clay deeded this part of the island over to me I went over and told them. I told Jackson. He said he’d tell the others. Toby would do what he said. I told them they’d never have to worry about losing their homes. My God, I love this marsh as much as my grandfather did, and all of them knew how he felt about it.…”

  “Well, perhaps you’ll pardon them for being a little confused,” he said. “They’ve got surveyors over there, and people in pink Izod and LaCoste shirts thunking around in their little deck shoes with no socks, making notes on clipboards, and every now and then Mengele himself pays a royal visit and chats everybody up, and his trusty sidekick Goebbels is over there every other day, and then I come poking around in their bushes and sticking tags on their live oaks…you can see why it might look to them like something’s up. And for the record, I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen the master plan.”

  I felt my face whiten.

  “You are definitely mistaken. I don’t care what you think you’ve seen. And even if you weren’t, Clay does not own Dayclear, nor do I. It belongs to them, the people who live there. My grandfather always said that it did.…”

  “Actually, nobody knows who it belongs to,” he said. “There’s no way you could establish clear title to those homes. I imagine they’ll be offered a handsome cash buyout. That’s the way it’s usually done.”

  “And how can you possibly know that?”

  “A friend of mine told me. Someone who lives in Dayclear. Perhaps you know of him. Ezra Upchurch? I gather he’s rather well known in the Lowcountry.…”

  “Ezra Upchurch! Living in Dayclear? I thought he was on John’s Island,” I said. “Of course I know of him. I know him, too. I used to play with him when we were both about eight, but then his mother came and got him and they moved.…What’s he doing back in Dayclear? I wouldn’t think things were lively enough for him over here.”

  “He thinks otherwise,” Lou Cassells said, smiling a new, cold smile. “He’s decided to come back to the humble village of his birth and stay a spell. Rediscover his roots, so to speak. As a matter of fact, I’m staying at his house, his and his old aunt’s. He’ll be happy to know that according to Mrs. Mengele, Dayclear is safe as a baby’s butt in a cradle.”

  Ezra Upchurch. Bastard child of a mother who fled Dayclear at fifteen, leaving him behind with his young grandmother. Changeling child possessed of a quicksilver mind and a steely will, so gifted that he graduated from the county high school at sixteen and went on to Morehouse College in Atlanta on a full scholarship, and from there to Yale Divinity School and then Duke Law. Full scholarships all. Then he came back to the Lowcountry and began a rich, glinting career that included preaching at the smallest, most time-lost pray houses in the marshes and woods, taking the smallest and most impossible pro bono legal cases for the remaining Gullah Negroes, playing piano in a number of scabrous, deep-woods roadhouses where few white faces were ever seen, disc jockeying for black jazz stations up and down the coast, racing his Harley-Davidson, and lecturing at colleges and universities all over the country for astronomical fees, most of which went to support the various drives, funds, and marches that he organized to improve the lot of his people. He was almost magically successful at these; the media adored him, as did what he called “my little folks” everywhere. A great many white Lowcountry people, particularly the gentry and those who aspired to be, called him an agitator. His supporters called him a savior. No one called him humble. His fat, flashing ego preceded him, to paraphrase Cyrano de Bergerac, by a quarter of an hour. To hear him speak was an unforgettable experience. I never had, not in person, but I had heard him on television; the fine hairs on my arms had risen at his words and voice. Ezra Upchurch, in Dayclear.

  What must I think about that?

  I shook my head slightly. It had begun to throb.

  “Well, since you know him so well, you go back and tell him that none of it’s true and I’m not going to let anything happen to this part of the island. And that includes Dayclear. And let that be an end to it. I don’t want to hear any more about this…silliness. Do you understand me?”

  He nodded his head and tugged at a forelock in an elaborate parody of a servant with his mistress.

  “Yes, Miz Mengele,” he drawled. “I understand, I sho’ does. You have, by the way, read Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

  I stared at him, speechless.

  “Ah, so you have. Well, then, doesn’t it give you the least little pang of fear, or whatever, to realize that you’re out here all alone in the wilderness with your husband’s greenskeeper? You know what came of that for Lady Chatterley.”

  I got up off the sofa and marched to the door and opened it and stood beside it, speechless with anger. Beyond the glass windows I could see that Estrellita’s mouth was open in a little round O and her black eyes were huge. She stared in at us.

  He turned and went out the door.

  “Go on home, Mrs. Venable,” he said, without looking back.

  “Go to hell, Mr. Cassells,” I said, my voice shaking.

  After they had gone I stood for a long time, staring out over the marsh and the creek, across it to the distant line of trees that marked the river. All of a sudden I could see it: a jumble of masts and flying bridges and antennas soaring over the rippling green marsh grass, villas and homes clustering around manicured lagoons that did not yet exist, golf carts crawling like beetles over the green hummocks where now the ponies cropped.

  The ponies…

  I would, of course, go to Clay about it the instant he got home. Of course I would. But that would be a while yet; I knew that he could not possibly be home yet from Atlanta. Usually his money trips lasted several days. So there was no need to leave the island and go back to Peacock’s. No need at all.

  I got up and straightened up the coffee table and plumped up the sofa pillows and gathered the spilled magazines and newspapers from the floor where I had left them. I pulled the bottle of Wild Turkey out from under the sofa and carried all of it into the kitchen. I tossed the magazines and newspapers into the trash basket and set it beside the back door, ready to carry over to the big Dumpster on Peacock’s.

  And then I poured myself another small drink and took it out onto the deck, and sat down in the old twig rocker, and put my feet up on the railing, as my grandfather and I had done a number of times before.

  There was all the time in the world.

  6

  This time it was Lottie who woke me.

  I know that I did not have more than the one drink, but when you have drunk as much as I did the night before, and when you are as small as I am, it doesn’t take much to drag you under again. It’s as if the alcohol still in your system is like a banked but living fire; it only takes the touch of a match and it’s off and roaring again. I fell asleep sometime around eleven in the morning, in the rocker, and only woke when
the sun was slanting toward midafternoon, my head hung cripplingly over the back of the chair. I heard myself give a great, gargling snore as Lottie shook me awake.

  I snorted and gaped and blinked, licking my lips. They were dry and chapped, and the sick-sweet taste of bourbon was strong on my tongue. She came into focus as I squinted at her, seeming in the painful dazzle of light off the creek to loom over me like a colossus. She was leaning against the railing, scowling at me and rolling my empty glass back and forth with her toe.

  “What are you doing here?” I rasped.

  “Better still, what are you?” she said. Her voice was the familiar twanging growl, but there was something in it I did not recognize, or rather, something not in it that I missed. None of the usual fudgy, tolerant warmth was there today. Her leathery face was closed and scowling. Her muscular arms were crossed over her chest.

  “You look like Daddy Warbucks.” I giggled, and then hiccupped loudly. “Oh, shit,” I said. “I think I fell asleep. My neck is killing me.”

  “I think you passed out,” Lottie said. “I hope it is killing you. What the hell do you think you’re doing, out here by yourself dead drunk?”

  “I am not dead drunk,” I said with what dignity I could muster. It was not much. “I had one little drink sitting out here, and I fell asleep. I hardly got any sleep at all last night.…”

  “No wonder,” she said. “It must have taken you all night to drink half a bottle of bourbon. This is bad stuff, Caro. I thought you didn’t keep booze out here.”

  “Well, ’scuse me,” I said indignantly, trying to sound righteously affronted. “How many times have I rooted you out at noon with a hangover that would stun an army mule?”

  “That’s me,” she said. “That’s what I do. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen, and I never do it unless I mean to. It’s fun and I like it and when I don’t want to do it I don’t. It’s different with you, and you know it.”