Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  We sat silently for quite a long time on the little dock, swinging our legs over the edge toward the water. The Whaler and the canoe had been put away in their cradles under the house, but I had forgotten the salt-faded old oilcloth cushions, and we laid them on the uneven old boards and stretched out on them in the sun. I closed my eyes under its red weight. I could hear the water slapping hollowly against the pilings below and smiled slightly. It was the sound of all my summers in this place.

  Beside me, Luis said quietly, “How is it for you? Is it all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, not opening my eyes. “So far it’s all right. It seems that so long as the sun is out, it’s okay.”

  “Then we shall stop the sun,” he said in the tone of Moses commanding the Red Sea to part, and I smiled again. Pretty soon the slapping water faded, and I think that I slept for a while.

  A great splashing and shrill shouts from Lita woke me. She and Luis were standing at the very edge of the dock, looking back toward the shore. I scrambled to my feet, sweating and confused, and staggered over to join them.

  Dolphins. A school of them, huge and rubbery and silvery, so close that you could see their silly, cunning smiles and hear the wet, breathy little noises of their blowholes. They were churning straight for the marshy banks of the creek, silvery thrashing ahead of them. And then, incredibly, they drove a roiling school of small fish into the reeds and floundered, slapping and blowing, out of the water and onto the bank after them. Each of the six or seven huge dolphins managed to eat a fair number of the fish before they half rolled, half flapped themselves back into the water. They frisked for a moment, flashing tails and fins, and then were gone.

  I began to laugh.

  “My grandfather told me about them,” I said. “I never believed him. He said there was a…what? A group, a pod…of salt river dolphins that actually drive the fish on shore and go after them and eat them. He said they only exist from about Seabrook down to Hunting Island, and that they taught themselves to do that ages ago, and it’s almost a genetic thing with them by now. But only with this particular group. Any visiting schools have got to do it the old-fashioned way. They work for it.”

  “Ah, Dios, how perfect,” Luis said softly. “They know so much better than we do how to use their world, and they do not need to either destroy it or leave it. They’re very smart fish, dolphins. Do you know that some of the old Gullahs call them horsemen?”

  “Horsemen? Why?”

  “I’m not sure I understand. It’s a tale one of the old men told around the stove at the store one night. I think it’s because the fishermen used to know a trick: they’d go out to where they knew the dolphins liked to hang out, and they’d bang on the sides of the boat underwater, slow, heavy bangs, and for some reason that attracted the dolphins, and they’d come swimming toward the boat, driving the fish before them. So there was fish for everybody then: the fishermen and the dolphins alike. I made out that they call them horsemen partly because they work for men like intelligent horses do. The ‘men’ part I think has to do with certain…ah, bodily parts that apparently are quite like…”

  “I get you,” I said, feeling myself redden.

  He leered.

  Lita came running back from the bank, flushed with excitement.

  “I touched one!” she cried. “I just reached right out and touched him on his head, and he let me! It was like touching wet rubber!”

  “They’re pretty tame,” I said. “The ones around here, anyway. You know, sometimes they sleep right off this dock, just sort of drift suspended in the water and sleep all night.”

  “How do you know they sleep?” Lita said. “Maybe they’re just fooling. I do that sometimes.”

  “You can hear them snore,” I said. “No kidding, I’m serious. I’ve heard them snoring in the nights in summer, when the windows are open, so loud that you can’t sleep. It’s a funny, snorty, bubbling sound, but it’s definitely snoring. When eight or ten of them are doing it, you can kiss your slumbers good-bye.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Luis said, obviously wanting to.

  “Scout’s honor. My grandfather said they’d been doing it since he was a young boy out here. If you don’t believe me, you just come spend the night sometime and listen yourself—”

  I stopped, reddening again.

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “Isn’t it lunchtime?” Lita said from the end of the dock, where she was watching in case the dolphins came back.

  “Can you wait a little longer?” Luis said. “We’re having company for lunch.”

  “Who, Abuelo?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Not much of one,” I said, as the menacing growl of the Harley-Davidson curled into the still air. It grew rapidly until it and the machine burst into the clearing at the same time. I saw that three people rode astride, one sandwiched between the other two.

  “It’s Mark!” Lita shrieked in an excess of joy. “It’s Mark the nark and Ezra Shmezra!”

  “And Sophia, of course,” Luis said dryly, giving her a long look.

  “Yeah. Her, too. Okay. I know. I’ll be polite.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at Luis over her head.

  “Competition,” he mouthed silently, and I laughed.

  “It starts young.”

  “Does it ever. Of course, she is one fine-looking lady, you must admit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I must, at that.”

  “Just not my type.” He grinned. “I like ’em down and dirty.”

  I bridled, and then looked down at myself. I was all black mud up to the knees of my blue jeans, and my rubber Bean shoes were caked with it. My T-shirt was spattered with marsh water. My hair hung around my face and stuck to it with noonday sweat, and I could feel twigs and bits of moss caught in it. In disgust I twisted it up off my neck and secured it with the rubber band I carry with me always, for just such a purpose.

  “That’s pretty,” Luis said. “You look sort of Spanish like that.”

  “Like one of Velázquez’s majas?”

  “Yeah. Like that. I’ll bet you’ve been told that before.”

  “Only once,” I said.

  Mark and Lita rushed to meet each other, shrieking in the ear-piercing treble of small children everywhere; I had almost forgotten it. They rushed off together down to the edge of the creek, where, from her extravagant gestures, I gathered that Lita was telling him about the dolphins. Ezra and Sophia came down the little rise to the edge of the boardwalk. He wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt and looked, Luis said in my ear, like a brick shithouse. Sophia, to my surprise, wore skintight, faded blue jeans spattered with black mud and a large, flapping man’s blue work shirt with an elbow out and filthy, wet sneakers. She still managed to look like an Ibo princess, though. Just a slightly grimy one. She was carrying the smart Louis Vuitton tote that I never saw her without, and I saw the outline of the ubiquitous camera and tape recorder inside it, as well as several small, plastic-wrapped bundles and a long, pale brown baguette.

  “Brothers and sisters,” boomed Ezra. “Let us break bread. Since we brought it, that is.”

  “We did, too. Caro brought enough for an army,” Luis said, clapping Ezra on his massive shoulder. In the sun that poured straight down, Ezra Upchurch shone almost blue. It was a beautiful color, rich and virile and somehow royal. I thought that he would match Sophia Bridges in elegance any day, as long as he stood in sunlight.

  “Caro,” Sophia said coolly. She looked levelly at me. Her face was calm and courteous, but closed.

  “Sophia,” I said back.

  We lapsed into silence, and the men stood quietly, too, watching us. What is the matter with everybody? I thought in irritation, but still I did not speak, and still we regarded each other, Sophia Bridges and I.

  What are you doing here? her long almond eyes said to me as clearly as if she had spoken. You are not a part of this company. You belong on the other side of that bridge. You belong with Clay Vena
ble. Where do you stand in this?

  I might ask you the same thing, my eyes said back to her. So do you belong with Clay Venable. So do you belong on the other side…of the bridge and the fence. Where do you stand in this?

  We were silent for another moment, and then, just as Ezra drew a breath to speak, we burst into simultaneous laughter, and the day slid smoothly into afternoon, wrapped in sunlight and the sweet false spring. Only then did I remember that it was New Year’s Eve.

  We ate lunch late, and we ate for a long time. I didn’t remember being so hungry for weeks, months. We ate most of my sandwiches and a great deal of Estelle’s fruitcake and divinity, and we finished off the silky truffle pâté with cornichons and the baguette Sophia brought.

  “Where did you get this gorgeous stuff?” I said, licking a smear of truffle off my fingers. You could probably get pâtés in Charleston, but I knew that the closest Peacock’s Island had to them was liverwurst.

  “She ordered it from this little bistro she knows, around the corner from her house in the Village,” Ezra said, drawing out “beee-stro.” “She sent to Charleston for the baguette. You could have fooled me. All this time I thought I was eating French bread.”

  Despite his disreputable clothes and shuck-and-jive demeanor, I knew that he was no stranger to truffle pâté and baguettes. Ezra had a town house in Washington, D.C., that I had heard was as spare and elegant as he himself was massive and shambling. Lottie had told me in amusement that Architectural Digest had been after him for years to let them do a spread on it, but he always told them that the hens were laying good and he didn’t want to disturb them, or other of the down-home nonsense that so charmed the national media.

  “I happen to know that you have a charge account at Zabar’s,” Sophia retorted. She was lying with her back against the railing of my porch, as indolent in the slanting sun as a jungle cat. After our explosion of mutual laughter, things between us had been comfortable, if not intimate. I enjoyed the comfort, knowing that intimacy with me or many other people was probably beyond this beautiful, tight-drawn creature. I saw her smile fully and often only at Mark—and once or twice at Ezra.

  “Wouldn’t that be something,” I murmured to Luis, when they had gone to the Harley to stow the plastic pitcher and the disposable champagne glasses they had had, Ezra told us, to go to the Edisto Wal-Mart for.

  “A veritable mating of titans.” He grinned. “But I wouldn’t count on it. I’d just as soon woo a totem pole as Miz Sophia Bridges, and Ezra has at least six women in every port. I don’t know how he’s standing his enforced celibacy down here.”

  “Maybe he isn’t,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think he is. He doesn’t cross the bridge to Peacock’s that I know of, and he’s around Dayclear practically all the time.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Hangs out, mostly. Talks to the old folks. Visits. Listens to the tales. Tells some of them around the stove. He’s preached once or twice. You forget he’s a preacher sometimes, but you should hear him in the pray house. It’s something to make your hair stand up. And he’s with Sophia and Mark a lot. He’s showing them all sorts of stuff, and she’s writing it down in the goddamned little book of hers, or poking that recorder in his face. And Mark is just drinking it in. That kid has bloomed like kudzu. I don’t think he had any idea he was black. Now I think he wishes he was as black as Ezra.”

  “That’s a switch for her,” I said. “I think all their friends in New York were white as a field of lilies. I’m surprised she allows the exposure.”

  “Yeah, I am, too. There’s something going on there, but I don’t know what it is. Sometimes she gets the oddest look on her face, and sometimes she just…turns her head. Or walks away. But she’s always back the next day. If I didn’t know her for the little Mengele-ite she is, I’d think her interest was more than anthropological. But leopards like that don’t usually change their spots.”

  The sun slanted lower, and was so beneficent on our faces and arms that no one moved off the deck for another hour or so. The children, worn out, napped on the living room sofas. We four talked, but it was not the sort of talk that demands or receives intense attention. It was as drifting and desultory as the talk between the oldest of friends, only we weren’t that. I put it down to the cockeyed magic of this strange, displaced spring day that had fallen into our midwinter.

  Presently, into a lull, I said, “Why do you come back here, Ezra?”

  He did not answer for so long that I thought perhaps I had offended him, and looked over at him. But his big face was calm, and his eyes were fastened off on the creek, where the glitter was turning from hot white to gold.

  “I think…to remember who I am,” he said. “And to remember who they are. I don’t think we’re going to have all this”—and his big arm made a sweeping motion that took in everything my eyes could see and all that they couldn’t—“very much longer.”

  I said nothing. Neither did Sophia Bridges. We carefully did not look at each other. I felt a bolt of complicity leap from my mind to hers, though. Shame and unease followed it. No fair. My bubble time was not up yet.

  “Nothing seems to have changed in Dayclear in a hundred years,” Luis said sleepily. “It’s like Brigadoon.”

  “I wish it were,” Ezra said. “The fact is, a lot has changed just since I was here last, and lots more since I left to go to college. The old ways are going. The old stories are being forgotten, and the old dances, and the old ways of making things…baskets, circle nets. None of the young folks come back often enough to learn the shouts or hear the histories and mythologies of their own families. In another generation, nobody is going to understand the language, much less speak it, and no kids are going to play ‘Shoo, turkey, shoo,’ or sing ‘Sally ’round the sunshine.’ Nobody’s scared of the hags and the plateyes anymore. We’ll even have lost our ghosts, and that’s when you know you’re a poor, sorry-assed people.”

  I felt rather than saw Luis Cassells’s eyes on me. I would not look up.

  “And you’re here to try to preserve the old ways? To see that they go on?” I said. I realized that I sounded like an elementary school teacher talking to her class, but I wanted to get off the ghost business quickly.

  “Oh, no,” he said, and laughed richly. “I leave all those fine endeavors to Miz Bridges here. She a cultural anthropologist atter all.” He gave it the rural black pronunciation. Sophia’s mouth tightened.

  “No, I’m just here to…bear witness, I guess. Oh, I do what I can. When I preach I talk about the real world, of course, because they live in it, after all, but I always end with one of the old songs, and I use the rhythms of the old shouts. For one thing, I love them. They come right up out of my gut. For another, no preacher is going to survive in these little communities who doesn’t tap into those deepest feelings.

  “It’s not that all the old ways are gone,” he went on. “I could take you all right now and walk you not three miles from here and show you a graveyard that’s completely surrounded with woods, just buried in them. Some of the graves are new, too. They’re hidden in the woods so the poor spirits of the dead can’t get out and get lost and roam away. And you’d be apt to find an alarm clock on lots of those graves, an old rusty drugstore windup job, with its hands stopped at the moment of the deceased’s death. And pictures, photos, in fancy frames. Family shots, mainly, but always what the dead loved most. I know of one fine picture of a mule in that graveyard.

  “All the old Dayclear names are there. Some of mine are. My mama and grandmama are there. So is my uncle, Auntie Tuesday’s husband. Peters. Miller. Cato. Bullock.” He paused a moment and looked intently at Sophia, who was digging for the tape recorder, to catch the scholarly words.

  “Mackey,” he said.

  She put the recorder down and turned her head away. But before she did, I thought I caught the glisten of tears in her dark eyes, and then wondered if I had, after all. It did not seem possible.

  The silence that fo
llowed was no longer comfortable. He seemed to realize that he had broken a spell.

  “And I painted my front door blue, in D.C.,” he said in a bantering tone. “Everybody admires it as a creative touch. They don’t believe me when I tell ’em it wards off evil spirits. But I haven’t had a plateye since I moved in.”

  We laughed, but we could not get the sleek skin of the moment back. I looked around restlessly. The heat was going out of the afternoon, and the sun was nearly level with the tops of the trees far across the marsh, on the verge of the inland waterway. The sky was turning gold. The old anxiety came stealing back, rising in my throat, marching up my vertebrae one by one, like stair steps.

  “I need to get back,” I said. “This has been…wonderful. I can’t tell you. But I’ve got…stuff I need to do.”

  “Me, too,” Sophia said briskly. “Mark and I have been invited to a little New Year’s Eve party with some of his kindergarten friends’ parents. Let me go get those children on the road.”

  “Can I persuade either of you to stay and listen to me preach at the New Year’s Eve watch service tonight?” Ezra said. “I can promise you more shouting and singing than you ever heard. I am amazing when I get going. You could get a whole chapter out of this thing, Sophie Lou.”

  “I really can’t. Thanks, though,” she said crisply. She got up and went into the living room to wake the children. In the darkening gold of sunset, she looked suddenly very small and thin. What was it he had said, to drive her away from us like this?

  He looked after her, and then at Luis.

  “Losin’ my fabled touch,” he said, and grinned, but there was no warmth in it.