Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Like I said, I never went back to Cuba. There wasn’t anything to go back to, really. My parents tried to run a little shop in Havana, but of course they knew nothing about that. They checked out with sleeping pills and rum one night about the time I discovered booze over here. My wife’s folks ended up on one of Fidel’s biggest agricultural cooperatives, doing field labor until they dropped from it, and my wife worked in the fields, too. I only found this out later. She never would come out, not even when I found a fairly safe passage for her and Anita. Ana always thought things were about to change. Always did. Anita married a young man from the cooperative and went with him into the mountains to start a new agricultural colony there, but it failed after the first year. It’s hard to tell anybody just how bad things are up in those hills. Everybody was checking out right and left, but she was nine months pregnant and spotting, and she didn’t want to risk the baby. Her husband left with the others, saying he’d be back in a day or two with food and supplies, and after the baby came they’d go back to Havana and start over. I don’t know if Anita had any sense or not, but she was Ana’s child to the core, and she believed him. I don’t know what happened to him. I guess she didn’t, either. Dead, probably, from liquor or a fight, a lot of them died young. Anyway, he didn’t come back and she went into a long and awful labor alone in their little shack, and the baby was born dead. She lay there bleeding to death with Lita beside her. I never even knew I had a grandchild until after they were all dead but her. She was not quite five. She wouldn’t leave her mother and the baby. She just lay down beside them and waited. It was days before the Red Cross found her. They located my wife back in Havana and brought Lita to her, and that’s where she’s been until I could get her out, after Ana died. She wouldn’t let me bring Lita out before that. Still waiting for things to get back to normal, she was. I have no picture of my daughter but the one made at her christening, and I cannot remember what my wife looked like, except for a picture I have that was made on our wedding day. Well, you know the rest of it; I told you yesterday. So. Does that earn me the right to hear the story of Caro Venable, from gestation up to now?”

  “One day,” I said, my eyes stinging with tears. “One day, maybe. My God, what a life. How could mine compete with that?”

  “Are we having a competition? I tell you, Caro Venable, for all its comings and goings and ins and outs and so forth, the best thing I can say about my life up to now is that I beat booze and I have Lita. It doesn’t seem very much for the amount of energy expended, does it?”

  “If that’s all you think a life like that adds up to, you’ve got a problem,” I said.

  “It was a selfish life,” Luis said briefly. “When all’s said and done, I did just what I wanted to. Anyway, I have a feeling things are about to change.”

  And he gave me such a showily exaggerated Latin leer that I could only laugh helplessly. If he had had a long, waxed mustache, he would have twirled it.

  “I have to go home now,” I said. “I’ve hung on breathlessly to your every word, but now, alas, my own duties call me.”

  “And are you impressed beyond words and moved almost to tears?”

  “I’ll think upon it and let you know,” I said lightly, but inside I was both those things, and not ashamed of it, though I would never tell him so.

  When he walked me to the car, he said, “Will you be staying out here? Lita is wild to see the ponies again.”

  “I’ve got to do Thanksgiving for about a million homeless lambs,” I said, “but I’ll try to come out after the weekend, and we’ll track them down. How will I let you know?”

  “I’ll know,” he said, bowing from the waist and kissing my hand. “I assure you, I’ll know.”

  I shut the Jeep’s door a little more smartly than was necessary, and he went back into the store. As he walked away, I could hear him laughing his hyena’s laugh. I laughed, too. It felt good.

  Two days before Thanksgiving, Jeremy Fowler walked down to the sea in Puerto Rico at four o’clock in the morning, sat down, and blew his brains out with a police .38 nobody knew he had. By noon we had the news on Peacock’s Island. By six o’clock that evening the company was in deep shock and full mourning.

  Clay and Hayes flew down from Charleston that afternoon as soon as they could get a plane out. I went to the office and put a note on the front bulletin board and told a weeping Shawna to pass the word to everybody: our house was open for whomever wanted to come. There would be drinks and some supper, if anybody wanted it.

  Almost everybody came. Most of those who had expected to go to their respective homes for Thanksgiving canceled their plans and drifted in, distraught and aimless. The two new couples had both left earlier in the week, but Sophia Bridges, who had not planned to go back to New York until Christmas, came. I was a little surprised at that. She had not known Jeremy, and knew few of the others; I had heard that she kept pretty much to herself and did not attend the formal and informal social occasions the company provides its employees. Shawna said, sniffling, that she seemed to prefer the company of her son to anybody else’s, and that that was probably a good thing, since nobody could find a baby-sitter that suited. The child was in the company’s modern day-care center when his mother was at work, but the rest of the time he was in her company. I wondered what she had done with him this evening. She had obviously come to our house in haste; her sleek black hair was disarrayed, and she still wore the slim jeans and sweatshirt she had obviously changed into when she got home that evening. Whoever she found for the boy would have to have been a last-minute solution.

  I had asked Estelle to stay, and she had ordered groceries and made sandwiches and cheese straws and baked a ham while I went to the liquor store and picked up deli potato salad and a couple of carrot cakes from the little specialty pastry shop in the mall. Clay’s youngsters picked at the food, but they lit into the liquor as if they were dying of thirst. By eight that evening more than a few of them were slurring their words, and some were weeping aloud. I didn’t blame them. If it had not been the time and place that it was, I would have loved to have drunk bourbon and cried along with them. I had known Jeremy, too, and loved him, as they did. It had been impossible not to. I knew that the tears were not only for his death but for the sad, shocking trajectory of failure and waste that led up to it. The word flies fast in a close, ingrown company like Clay’s. Everyone there knew about the collapse of Calista Key. Most knew that it would be a severe blow to the company, although few if any could have known just how severe. Under the grief and incredulity was fear. Fear of what the catastrophe might mean to both the company and to them personally, and a deeper and older fear: the fear of the golden, vital young when the first and the best of them falls.

  I moved among them, patting shoulders and kissing cheeks and hugging whoever held out their arms. Some of them are only ten or so years younger than I am, but they have always seemed like my children to me, or rather, like young kin that I do not see often but still feel a vague responsibility for. With the exception of Sophia Bridges, I have known them all for some time, and many for years. It was as easy and natural for me to mop tears and exchange funny or bittersweet fragments of remembrance about Jeremy as if we had all been students together or denizens of the same small town. The only thing I could not seem to share with them was the tears. Mine lay, clotted and swollen, just at the base of my throat, and would not fall. I remember wondering if I could not cry for Jeremy Fowler, who on earth would I ever weep for again?

  In a way I was glad it was just me on this first evening. In deep distress Clay goes still and silent, and sometimes seems cold and correct but little more. This is not true, of course; inside he suffers and bleeds like everyone else. I have often thought of Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—when I think of Clay in grief. It is his only armor, and I bless it for what ever ease it may afford him, but others, the young especially, need to be wept with and held. I could do that or, at least, the latter. Clay co
uld have done neither. Later was when his iron and stillness would serve them. And as for Hayes, it seemed to me that he could only gibe. This night was not the time for that.

  By nine o’clock most of them had gone home to drink some more or drive the baby-sitters home, to sit up into the small, cold hours of the morning talking about it, to cry again, and finally to sleep. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the big silver urn and went over and sat down beside Sophia Bridges. She was sitting where she had been for most of the evening, alone on the white sofa beside the fireplace in the big living room that looks out to sea. I had forgotten to draw the curtains, and, following her gaze, could see the distant line of white lace that was the surf curling in on the dark beach. The fire had burned itself nearly out.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had more time to spend with you,” I said, sitting down on the arm of the sofa. “This has just about done us all in. Jeremy was something special. I wish you had known him.”

  She smiled up at me faintly. Her face under the untidy hair seemed younger this evening, and softer. I thought perhaps it was because I had never seen her smile before.

  “Oh, but I did,” she said. “I’ve heard nothing but Jeremy since I got here. By now I feel like I know him like I would know my brother. I think maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come tonight, but I thought it would be worse if I didn’t. He was obviously a powerful icon. I didn’t want to seem to diss him.”

  She smiled again, as if to show me that her use of the slang was intentional. Two smiles in one evening, back to back. Through the fatigue that suddenly swamped me, and the numb, dumb desire just to go to bed and sleep, I felt a small sting of sympathy for her. It is not easy in the best of circumstances to walk into the Peacock Island Plantation Company and be instantly accepted. How much harder it must be if you were black, alone, and known to be “the best of the lot.” I knew that I had seen no one in conversation with her for any length of time all evening.

  “It was just the right thing to do,” I said. “They’ll all appreciate it when they’ve got a little perspective on this. I know it’s not so easy at first, getting your feet wet down here. It must seem like the other side of the moon from…where was it? New York?”

  “New York; right,” she said, stretching her long arms and rotating them in their sockets. Even in the sweatshirt she looked as elegant as a Modigliani.

  “We’ve lived in the Village since…for a couple of years. On Bleecker Street. A fabulous little carriage house; I was so lucky to find it. There was a woman next door…a lovely Swedish woman; she got to be a real friend…who came in and stayed with Mark every day. I wouldn’t have been able to finish my doctoral degree other-wise. I guess you can see why I was so hesitant about having an African-American woman stay with Mark. He’s never had one. For a long time I didn’t realize that he’s actually afraid of people with dark skins. Now I see that I was not only foolish to insist on that, but I was doing him actual harm. I need to apologize to you about that little remark, Mrs. Venable, among other things. When I’m scared I get snotty.”

  “Call me Caro, please,” I said, liking her, all of a sudden, very much indeed. I could see precisely why she pulled isolation around her and her son like a cloak. She probably had few peers. How many young black women could imagine being where Sophia Bridges was in her life? How many young white women could imagine the life itself?

  “You have absolutely nothing to apologize to me for,” I said. “As I said, there are a million things easier than walking into a tight little society that has existed quite nicely without you for a long time. They’ll come to you eventually; I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Though not many of them came here with reputations like yours preceding them. That may be part of the problem. Clay thinks you’re awfully special.”

  The easy smile vanished and the remote Ibo princess was back. I knew that there would be no easy victories with this one. But it was good to know, too, that there were chinks in her armor.

  “I’m glad to have his high opinion,” she said formally. “I’ve worked very hard for a long time to be special. It’s what I have now in place of friends or a nice house in Connecticut or a husband. In the long run, I’ve always known that when you’re black you’d better be special, because you can’t count on the rest of it. It’s something I want Mark to learn young. But you were right that first day; he has to live in the world he finds himself in. My baby-sitter tonight is an African-American woman, and he was doing fairly well when I left him. He’d almost stopped sniffling. She’s as old as his grandmother, and she’s lighter than me.”

  “Well, good,” I said, unsure whether it was the right thing to say or not. Was that going to be her criteria? Black women might tend her son only if they were mulatto matrons? I wondered if she had ever seen the movie Six Degrees of Separation.

  She made no move to leave, and declined coffee or a bite to eat or another glass of wine. So I hauled myself up by my mental bootstraps and said, “How is your work going? Clay said you had a degree in cultural anthropology; are you finding it useful here?”

  “Yes, that was my master’s,” she said. “Up to now I’ve mainly been doing orientation, and you know of course that that’s the same for everybody. I’m starting now to research the Gullah culture, though. I’m going into Charleston to the library next week. It should have something. I understand that there are several neighborhood units in this area, almost intact. It would be interesting to tie that in with the new development somehow; I think a lot of prospective home-owners would find that sort of ethnicity an attractive part of the whole picture. It would give such texture and resonance to the package.…”

  I thought of the dilapidated little gray houses in Dayclear, warm with pine and kerosene lamplight against the winter twilight, and the sweet, liquid, and nearly incomprehensible music of the Gullah tongue that was still sometimes spoken over on the island, and about the immense dignity and beauty of the old faces I knew from there. They would be amazed to know that they could be considered texture and resonance. My liking for her faded. I realized that I would love nothing more than to take her out to the settlement and fling her into the middle of it and leave her floundering there among her theories and pretensions.

  “Then you should really come with me someday soon to my part of the island, back on the marshes,” I said. “I spent most of my summer vacations there, in my grandfather’s house, and the house is still mine…ours. There’s one of the oldest Gullah…ah, units in the Lowcountry near there, a little settlement called Dayclear. Why go to the library when you can go to the source?”

  “Clay mentioned something about Dayclear,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was actually part of the island. That would be a real opportunity for me, Mrs. Venable…Caro. I could take my tape recorder and a camera, and I’d love for Mark to see something like that in situ. Could we take you up on it soon?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, baring my teeth in a smarmy smile. “We can go early next week, if you like. I’m tied up with this Thanksgiving oyster roast thing, but maybe the Monday or Tuesday after that?”

  “I’ll put it down,” she said. In another five minutes she was gone and Estelle and I put the kitchen to rudimentary rights, then I sent her home and went up to my little study and fell asleep almost before I hit the daybed.

  It was nearly a week later before I got Sophia Bridges and her son, Mark, over to the island. Late on Thanksgiving evening our crisp weather gave way to a long spell of fog and murk, with occasional fretful spatters of rain. Despite the company’s advertising brochures, our late fall weather is seldom anything to cheer about; it is the start of our tenacious fits of sulking humidity that the Gulf exhales all across the deep South. Lingering leaves and moss hang sodden and sticky at eye level; doors swell and shoes go furry gray-green in closets, for the temperature is not cool enough for heat and too cool for air-conditioning. The air is the color and consistency of veal stock. If we are lucky, this climactic tantrum will run itself out a couple
of weeks before Christmas, and those holidays will be bright and crisp and mild, the stuff of rhapsodic letters home from vacationing Canadians. Christmas is the true time of the snowbird, the season of the blue-fleshed but determined ocean bather, but we had a few of them even over our soggy Thanksgiving weekend. I saw them from the living room windows and was doubly grateful that Clay had canceled the Thanksgiving oyster roast. The weather, coupled with the painful knowledge that it was on a Peacock Island Plantation Company beach that Jeremy Fowler had made his final exit, put paid to any notion that a seaside revel could be enjoyed. Instead, we had everybody back to our house and used the oysters as on-the-half-shell appetizers, and Estelle and her niece and I cooked four turkeys and panfuls of corn bread and pecan dressing and made enough gravy to float a catamaran. By the time the last of our guests drifted home, I was drooping and stupid from fatigue. Clay kissed me on the top of the head, sent Carter to take Estelle and Gwen home, and pointed me upstairs to bed.

  “I owe you for these past four days,” he said. “You’ve fed and succored my flock twice now. I’m going to start cleaning up. Carter can help me when he gets back. You sleep in tomorrow. Don’t get up till you wake up.”

  “You’re walking on your knees yourself,” I said, and it was true. His narrow face was actually sunken with fatigue and strain, and his crystal-blue eyes were dull. I knew the trip to Puerto Rico had been terrible for him. Jeremy’s shattered parents had come from Texas, savagely seeking somewhere to lay the blame for their pain, and word had come that Lila Fowler had collapsed back in Philadelphia and been hospitalized at a discreet and prodigiously expensive private institution that specialized in treatment for substance addiction. Lila, it turned out, had been eating Percodan like after-dinner mints and washing them down with 150-proof Mount Gay rum. Her parents were threatening legal action. On top of his very real grief for Jeremy and the specter of the company’s collapse, I wondered how Clay could bear it all.