Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “That was just the right thing to do,” I said, seeing in my mind the image of a small child huddled in a wrecked mountain hut, her shivering flesh pressed to the cold flesh of her mother. I did not think I was going to be able to bear this.

  Suddenly she gave a great sob, and then pressed her fists against her mouth. Her whole body shook with the effort not to cry.

  “It’s all right,” I said, beginning to rock her. “It’s good to cry. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a way of honoring Nissy. She would be pleased with your tears.”

  And then they came, a great, wild storm of them, so hard and primitive and somehow ancient that I was, for a little while, frightened for her. She wept and howled, and sometimes lapsed into a phrase or two of anguished Spanish, and then howled again. I could almost hear this sound rolling out over a jungle somewhere, as old as time itself and as implacable. These were not a child’s tears.

  Presently she began to subside into simple sobs and, after a long while, sniffles. When she finally pulled herself away from me and looked up, her eyes were swollen nearly shut, and her face was congested with red anguish. But her breathing was slow again, and deep.

  “I think I’m hungry,” she said.

  Auntie was back by now, and she brought in a bowl of the soup, presumably bearing its cargo of herbs, and a piece of hot cornbread. She sat down on the bed beside Lita and began to feed the soup to her by the spoonful, crooning wordlessly. I stood and stretched and looked down. The front of my shirt was soaking wet with Lita’s tears.

  “You go in that drawer in the front room an’ git one of them ol’ undershirts,” she said. “Th’ow that shirt of your’n in the wash pot. Don’t do to sit around in it. That’s poison there.”

  I looked at her.

  “It’s what come out of her,” she said, smiling. “The song and the tea drawed it. Look like it got most of it, too, but you don’t want it soakin’ into you. I bile it with lye soap when I does my wash and Ezra bring it to you.”

  “Oh, Auntie, I don’t care about the shirt,” I said. “I’m just so glad she’s better, and so grateful to you.…What was in that tea? What was in the soup?”

  “This ‘n’ that. Little feverfew, some goldenseal, some seamuckle, jimsey, little life everlasting. You couldn’t make it, chile. It’s all in the words you says over it. I make some up before you go and you can give it to her if she git bad again, though.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be with me,” I said. “I think she’ll be staying with her grandfather, unless he’s really late getting back. I’ll be glad to stay with her until he comes, though.”

  “I give you some anyway,” she said.

  Lita fell asleep again, and we three women sat in chairs that Janie dragged out into the dooryard, talking idly of nothing much, taking the sun. It was slanting low when the noise of an old truck came down the road, followed by the angry burr of Ezra’s Harley.

  I met them up at the store. Luis’s face was drawn and grim.

  “Lita?” he said.

  “Sleeping. She’s been awake, and talked, and cried most of it out, I think. And she ate a good lunch. I doubt that she’ll forget it, Luis, but I think she’ll heal from it. Auntie…Auntie has been beyond wonderful.”

  “I don’t think you’ve been so bad yourself, Caro,” he said, relief making the tight muscles around his mouth sag into a tired smile. “You know, it was you she cried out for before she stopped talking.”

  “Oh, Luis…” I said softly.

  I can’t take the weight of this, I thought.

  “It’s okay,” he said, understanding. “It’s more than enough that you were here today.”

  I found some beer in the cooler and opened it for him and Ezra and Esau, who had come wearily into the store behind him. They all took deep swallows, but no one spoke.

  Finally I said, “The colt?”

  “The colt is alive,” Ezra said, and his voice was hard and remote. I had not heard this voice before. His eyes were distant, too. I could not imagine what they saw.

  “The vet thinks he’ll make it. He didn’t eat many of the apples, apparently.”

  “He likes sweet potatoes better,” I said, and felt the tears sting again.

  “Well, that saved him then, because those apples were full of it, whatever it is,” Ezra said. “The vet isn’t sure, but he’s got a friend with his own lab who’s running tox tests right now. He thinks probably botulism toxin. Nothing else is really powerful enough to down a grown horse so fast. He thinks that they ate the apples last night early. It would have been put in by injection. He found the holes in some of the apples.”

  “My God, you don’t think it was a doctor!” I cried. Somehow the thought was horrifying beyond words.

  “No, no. You can get the stuff; plastic surgeons use it, and other kinds of doctors, too. It’s around. There’s probably a real good black market for it, if you know where to go. And you can get hypodermics at any drugstore. I don’t think whoever did it got the stuff himself, but I think somebody he knew did. We’ll know more when the test comes in late tonight. If it’s botulism toxin, I think I know where to start looking for the source.”

  “Where?”

  “Better you just don’t ask,” he said. “I’ve got some friends in not very high places.”

  We were quiet again for a bit.

  “Do you think any of the rest of the herd got into the apples?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it right now,” Luis said. “Simon Miller and his boys from Greenville rode and walked every inch of the creek and the bottoms where they usually are. They didn’t see anything. And there were an awful lot of apples left. It looked to me like the pile we took day before yesterday was mostly still there. They’re in a croker sack in the back of the truck. I’m going to drop them in the incinerator at the dump on Edisto when I go tonight.”

  “When you go?”

  “Walk me down to Auntie’s,” he said. “I need to see Lita. We’ll talk on the way.”

  We walked side by side down the rutted sandy road. The swift darkness was rolling in from the Inland Waterway, and the shadows of the Spanish moss laid long fingers across the road. The air was cooling rapidly. Luis walked with his hands in his pockets, his stride heavy and slow. I cradled my elbows in my hands against the chill. The old white Fruit of the Loom men’s undershirt was decent and clean, but it was worn thin.

  “I’m taking her over to Edisto,” he said finally, not looking at me. “Ezra has a friend over there who’s not using his trailer. He left the key with Ezra. I can’t stay here with her, Caro. Everywhere she looked she’d remember…And who knows what’s going to come next? I can’t take the chance. I’m quitting your husband’s company, too, as soon as I can give notice in the morning. I’m not going to make myself a sitting target; she’s the one who’s vulnerable.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks, looking at him.

  “Dear God, surely you don’t think that Clay…”

  “Of course not. But I think that somebody acting in his name, if not with his knowledge or permission, stuck those needles in those apples. We’ll probably never find out who, but I don’t really care. I can’t afford to take chances with her. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “But…we…you were winning! I’ve already told you I’m not going to turn over this land; there’s no more fight to fight.…”

  He looked at me in disbelief.

  “Winning what? The right to eat apples with botulism toxin in them? If that’s a victory, I can’t afford it, Caro.”

  I could not argue with that. Desolation settled over me. The night turned vast and cold. There were stars, the same ones I had seen over Kylie’s ocean four nights before, but I could not see their light now. It did not seem to reach the earth.

  “I’ll miss both of you,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could. My voice shook.

  He took a great breath as if to speak in return, but then did not. Presently he said, “You could come by and see us sometime
on your way to Charleston. It’s not far off the highway. Lita would love that. I’ll be around; I’m not going to look for anything for a while, till I know she’s going to be all right. Maybe when we know about the colt. After that I’ll find something and get her into preschool. Ezra knows a woman with a good little one near the trailer park.”

  “Well, of course,” I said, thinking of it: this great, exuberant force of a man, with his wild darkness and his big shoulders, pent up in a double-wide in a trailer park. The living flame that was Lita battering at those enclosing walls…

  I knew that I would not visit him on Edisto.

  “So when will you go?”

  “In the morning, I think. Or later tomorrow. If the colt comes along like the vet thinks he will, I’d like to take her by to see for herself. I think Esau and Janie will take him when he’s well enough to leave; he’ll be used to people then, and the vet doesn’t think the herd will take him in after he’s been away so long. They’ll smell us on him. The Bigginses have a pen behind the store. I can bring Lita over in the summer and she can learn to ride him. You could come, too.…”

  The plans sounded positive, full of hope, but his voice was merely defeated.

  “Luis…” I began, unsure what I would say but willing almost to say anything that would bring life back into that voice.

  “Don’t, Caro,” he said, his head down so that I could not see his face. “You can’t straddle two camps, and it’s not possible for you to choose one. You’ve lost too much already. I would not permit it if you could.”

  I was silent. What were we speaking of, or rather, not speaking of, here?

  “Abuelo! Grandpapa!” a small voice shrieked, a voice with relief and joy behind it, and we looked up to see Lita tearing out of the cabin door toward us, her arms outstretched, her face wreathed in smiles. He opened his arms and took two great strides forward, and she ran into them and was enclosed.

  After that I painted. I painted for almost two straight days and nights, faster and more intensely than I have ever painted before, virtually scouring color onto the paper and then, when it tore, abandoning my watercolors and pulling out my old oils and the moldy canvases I found stacked in the utility closet and slashing at them with palette knife and stiff drypoint brushes. I put on my grandfather’s old tapes of Beethoven and Mahler, great, crashing, apocalyptic music, and I built up the fire, and when I got so tired and hungry that I dropped the knife, I opened cans of Vienna sausage and tuna fish and ate them with soda crackers and rat cheese and washed them down with Diet Cokes and fell asleep on the sofa before the fire, and dreamed more paintings.

  It was almost like automatic writing, I thought, watching as if from a distance the work unrolling from my fingers onto the canvases. It was not that I was unaware of what I did; indeed, I felt an almost preternatural control, an awesome kind of focus, that I have never felt before. It was simply that I did not quite know where my subject matter was coming from. I did not go out into the marshes and sketch or photograph and return to work, as was my habit. I did not leave the living room of the house. What I painted was the island: the marshes and the river and the creeks and the hammocks, and the secret groves of live oaks and the shrouding moss, but it was not an island I knew. It seemed to be an island out of another time, seen through other eyes. I painted stormy skies and nets flying like clouds, and dark people in fierce colors with their heads thrown back and their arms outstretched, shouts and songs stretching the cords of their shining throats. I painted fires in black woods and not quite human creatures out of an African night a millennium before. I painted baptisms in blood-dark rivers and burials in firelit woods. I painted wild horses, running, running. Running free.

  When I finished painting, as suddenly as I had begun, morning was well along on the third day after Luis and Lita found the horses, and I was as cool and dry and depleted as if I had given birth. And perhaps I had.

  I took a shower and cooked myself a real breakfast and took the paintings out onto the deck and propped them in the white sunlight and studied them. They were crude and hastily done and primitive past anything I had never even seen in my mind, and they had a power that almost frightened me. I could not even imagine where they had come from. Well, that was not entirely true; I knew or could sense that they sprang from the bottomless well of red anger I had discovered at the poisoning of the horses, and the fear I had felt for Lita and the colt and the island…and for Clay. But the images themselves…it was as if they had passed through me from somewhere else, not had their genesis in my mind. I poked around inside myself, prodding carefully, to see if that all-generating rage still lived there. I felt none at all. Just the emptiness.

  As if they had been waiting until I finished my work, Ezra and Lottie Funderburke drove up in Lottie’s little Subaru truck. I greeted them calmly, almost peacefully. I had not known that they knew each other, but it did not surprise me. Two such forces of nature on a small island: of course they would meet. Incuriously, I looked at each to see if the nature of the relationship was apparent, but it was not. They could be lovers or mortal enemies during a truce. The only thing I thought that they could not be was casual acquaintances.

  “Coffee, for God’s sake,” Lottie said, stumping up onto the deck, and then, “Jesus, God, Caro! Are these yours?”

  “I think so. Nobody else here but us chickens,” I said. “You want coffee, too, Ezra?”

  “Please. Whhhoooee, look at that stuff! You been hag-rode in the night, Caro?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said, and padded inside, barefoot, to put on the coffee.

  When I came back out with the coffee tray and some stale doughnuts, Lottie was sitting on the deck floor with her back against the railing studying the paintings. Ezra stood looking out at the morning dance of the light on the creek.

  “Whatever got ahold of you, you treat it good, you hear?” Lottie said. “This stuff is dynamite. I don’t know if you’ll do much with them around Charleston or in the village center. Likely scare the bejesus out of the culturines and the retired admirals. I know some odd little galleries around that would love to hang them, though. I’ll put some up in the studio, too. The kind of people who’ll buy them stop by my place pretty often. You think you’ve got any more of that in you, or did you paint it all out?”

  “I just can’t tell yet,” I said. “It’s like somebody else that I don’t know did it. I’m not going to show it or sell it, though. Not now. Maybe when I can tell whether or not it’s a real direction, or just a twitch…”

  “More an explosion, I’d say,” Ezra said, grinning. “You get any madder than that and you gon’ blow a hole in that canvas.”

  “I don’t feel mad now,” I said. “I know I was the other day, but I can’t seem to find it again.”

  “I don’t wonder,” he said. “It’s all in there.”

  He gestured at the paintings.

  “So, what about the colt?” I said. “What about Lita…and Luis? Have you gotten the toxicology reports yet?”

  “The colt is up and running around and eating,” he said. “I’m going to take him over to Janie and Esau’s in the morning. He’s already let the vet slip a snaffle on him. Lita is talking a blue streak and pestering Luis to bring her back over here. He doesn’t feel like he can do that right now. He’s got her in preschool half a day. The other half he stays with her. He’s looking for somebody over there to stay with her after school; he’s got to get some work pretty soon. Meanwhile, mornings, he’s doing some legwork for me around the Lowcountry. The vet was right; it was botulism toxin. I know a guy who knows a guy knows a guy who might be able to find out where it was bought. We do that, we know who bought it. Luis is visiting old…contacts of mine. Be a good thing to know, that.”

  “Is it…Could he be in any kind of danger?”

  “Not much, I don’t think. Not till he gets closer to home base on it, anyway. Luis knows how to take care of himself. He’s in less danger than he would be if he stayed on this island. I
agree with him about that.”

  “Have you been to the police?” I said. “Surely if illegal poison was used…”

  “No. Somehow I can’t imagine the authorities getting real upset over a dead marsh tacky. The rest is speculation. I think it’s island business. I think the island ought to see about it.”

  “I just can’t believe this,” I said. “Who on this island would hurt Luis? Who would hurt that child? I know you think somebody in Clay’s organization is behind this, but I think you’re just plain wrong. That’s…that’s James Bond stuff. I don’t know anybody in the company who’s even capable of thinking like that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  I dropped my eyes.

  “No. I don’t.”

  But I did. I don’t know how I knew, but I did know.

  “Well, listen, Caro, I hope you can scrape some of that mad back up, because I think you might need it,” Lottie said. “I have a message for you from that nitwit in your husband’s office, Shiny, or whatever her name is. She called me saying she couldn’t raise you either at the house or over here. Your phone’s off the hook. Said to tell you Clay was coming in this morning; he’s probably at the office now. I assume you’re going to want to share the little tidbit about the horses with him, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe he knows,” I said. I did not want to have to tell Clay about the horses. I did not want, now, to have the conversation that we should have had almost a week ago. I just wanted to go to sleep, and then to get up and paint some more.

  “I doubt it,” Lottie said. “Old motormouth would have blabbed it if he did. She practically told me what color his jockstrap was before I hung up on her.”

  “I’ll go over there after lunch,” I said. “I really need to get some sleep now. I think I’ve painted through two nights.”

  Ezra looked at me.

  “I think you ought to go now, Caro,” he said.

  I looked back at him. Somehow I did not want to ask him why.

  They finished their coffee and left. Just before he got into the passenger side of Lottie’s truck, Ezra turned and looked up at me.