Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  And yet, for all practical purposes, he had ended that life yesterday. Or had it been I? I did not know even the most basic truth of all this, and so I sat in the soft sun of late January and waited for what would come next.

  It was Sophia Bridges, on Ezra’s motorcycle. She came roaring into the clearing and slewed smartly to a stop, dismounting in one single fluid motion of her long, elegant legs and unpacking a small sweet-grass basket from the saddlebag. I stared at her. She might as well have ridden up on a Komodo dragon. Even in my strange, suspended state, I realized how profoundly Sophia had changed on this island. There was little of the chilly, distant woman I had met in the kitchen of the guest house before Thanksgiving. She seemed almost totally a creation of this wild island now.

  “I brought you some of Auntie’s magic soup,” she said, dropping down beside me in the rickety chair that had been my grandfather’s. “And I wanted to see how you are. You took a bad knock yesterday, Ezra says.”

  A Southern woman is raised from birth to say when someone asks how she is, “Oh, fine, thank you for asking.” I remembered saying it even when the enormity of Kylie’s death was still new, and remembered the strange looks it evoked from the asker.

  But now I simply said, “I think I’m in bad trouble, but I don’t know how I feel yet. It’s like being shot or something, and it hasn’t started hurting yet but you know it will any minute. I don’t even know how to describe it. But thanks for asking.”

  She grinned wryly at that last, and stretched out her legs in the old faded jeans that were her island uniform.

  “I think I know. I remember when Chris told me he was leaving me. It seemed like there ought to be some kind of book that would tell me how to feel and what to do about it. You just don’t know who or what you are anymore, do you?”

  “I guess that’s it,” I said. “Mainly, I just can’t believe that what’s happened…really happened. I just can’t believe it.”

  “I know. In my case, I didn’t know who I was anyway, so in the end it wasn’t so much different from the way I usually felt. But it must be awful for you. You never much doubted who you were, did you?”

  “I guess I never much doubted what I was. I think there must be a difference that I’m just learning about. So much for teaching old dogs new tricks.”

  “Well, I guess the main thing is not to do anything sudden,” she said. “Nothing’s cast in stone, is it? I mean, you haven’t decided really to leave or anything, have you? Things change so fast, Caro. They really do. That’s one thing I’ve finally learned. Things change.”

  “I guess I haven’t decided anything,” I said. “But, Sophia…I don’t think I can live with…what will happen over here. I don’t think I can be around for that.”

  “Then where would you go?”

  I just looked at her. I had not gotten that far. She was right. Where would I go? The town house? And risk running into Hayes Howland or Lucy every time I put my head out my front door? See the line of green on the horizon that was the fringe of Peacock’s Island every time I walked on the Battery? No. Not the town house.

  “I never got around to residential options,” I said.

  “Neither did I, but one presented itself, anyway, and one will for you,” she said. “Maybe the first thing we both needed to learn was just to let go and let life do it.”

  “Well,” I said, feeling absurd laughter start deep in my stomach, “life has done gone and done it.”

  And we sat in the sun and laughed and laughed, like schoolgirls giddy with new spring and limitless possibility.

  Presently she said, “I came to tell you what Ezra plans to do. He wanted to come tell you himself, he’s so proud of it all, and he was just sure that the jewel in the crown would be to have you march with them to meet the media. It’s the old Upchurch touch, doncha know. The piquant, poignant little coup de grace. When I got through telling him how many kinds of assholes he was he saw the wisdom of letting me come alone to tell you. It’s a good plan and I think it could work, but I can also see how it would just finish you off if you thought you had to be part of it. My advice to you is to go somewhere off-island…like maybe Jamaica or the U.S. Virgins, or Bhutan…until this is over. It’s going to hurt some folks you care about before it does any good, and whether it will stop the project or not is anybody’s guess. Mine would be that it might stop Clay but it probably won’t even make a dent in South Ward’s hide. But Ezra’s good, I’ll give him that. He’s done more with less to work with than this. It’s just that he is essentially a butthead and will never understand why you don’t want to see Clay pounded through the ground.”

  “Do you understand?” I said.

  “Of course I do, Caro,” she said softly. “I’ve loved a man. You don’t stop just because they’ve done a big awful. It may change the way you feel about them, but it doesn’t necessarily lessen it.”

  I rubbed my eyes hard and said, “You better tell me what Ezra’s got cooking,” and she did.

  When she was done, I said on a long breath, “My God. How could he do that in less than twenty-four hours?”

  “His Washington staff did most of it,” she said, and it was only then that I remembered that Ezra Upchurch did not always wear overalls without a shirt and work under the punishing Lowcountry sun with a hoe or a wrench, or even a mule team.

  “You ought to know, too, that I’ve resigned and that I’m going to be marching,” she said soberly.

  “What…did Clay say?” I said.

  “I don’t know. He’d gone to Charleston. I left a letter.”

  “What will you do next?”

  She shrugged and smiled. It was a peaceful smile.

  “It will emerge,” she said.

  “I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole,” I said, smiling back at her bleakly.

  “Yeah. I meant it when I said you ought to get out of here for a few days. Get some perspective. I don’t see how you can, this close.”

  But I found that I could not do that. I could see perfectly well the wisdom of her advice, but I could not seem to leave the island house. I did not feel anxious or afraid, and I was not terribly aware of anything beyond the dull, disbelieving grief I felt whenever I thought of Clay, but I still could not wander far from the house. So I cleaned. I put on all the West Coast jazz I could find—somehow symphonic music threatened my precarious hold on peace and baroque music seemed as if it would break my heart—and waded into cleaning my grandfather’s house.

  I had not thought it really dirty, only cluttered with the residue of many years of island living, most of which I was loath to discard, since it had belonged to my grandfather. But with my microscopic new focus I saw years, decades, of the kind of dull, mucky patina that humidity and steady salt winds leave. I scrubbed and mopped and scoured and swept and vacuumed and changed ancient, sticky shelf paper and threw out jars of rock-hard garlic salt and clumped herbs and spices, and disinfected and polished and even did a little touch-up painting. I slept and started over the next day. When I was finally done, when I could find nothing else to rout out or touch up or scrub and my nails were broken to the quick and my muscles ached down to the bone and my body smelled of days-old sweat, I stopped and took a long shower and looked around me. The house shone. There was nothing more here that I could do. And the telephone had not rung.

  I realized only then that for three days I had been waiting for Clay to call and say it was all a mistake.

  I sat in the sunset of the night before Ezra’s great march and felt the first sly, promissory fingerings of a great grief and a greater rage, and called Janie Biggins and found out where Luis and Lita Cassells were staying on Edisto. And then I got into the Cherokee and drove through the translucent, fast-falling dusk until I was there. If anyone had asked me why, the best I could have done would be to say, I need to be with people who know who I am.

  The Creekview Court had no view of Milton Creek, which I assumed to be the nearest body of water off Edisto Oak Lane. But it did hav
e a view of the island supermarket on one end and a nice panorama of woods and marsh on the other. I don’t know what I had thought a trailer park would be like; the only image that came readily to mind at the words was the pitiful, flattened wreckage left behind by the South’s frequent, vicious, trailer-eating tornadoes. But the Creekview was as neat and pretty as any small village whose inhabitants had considerable pride of place, and looked to me to be about as permanent as most. It was apparently a mature park; the plantings and trees were sizable and beginning to green up, and there were towering camellia bushes blooming fervently around many of them. Instead of rusted aluminum camp chairs and rump-sprung junkers, there were gaily painted wooden outdoor furniture and big umbrellas and well-tended sedans and midsize sports utility vehicles, and a good number of bikes and skates spoke of children. In the luminous green afterglow from the sunset, lights in windows were cheerful and welcoming, and joggers and walkers and in-line skaters thronged the clean streets. A thin white paring of a new moon rode high in the sky, waiting to bloom. It reminded me of a village scene painted by a minor Dutch artist of the eighteenth century, naive and idealized. For a long moment I paused at a cross street and simply drank it in. I would have given anything, at that moment, to belong to a place like this, my arena small and landlocked, my house as movable as a turtle’s shell in case of calamity.

  The small side street where Luis and Lita were staying had only four trailers, and since one of them had a huge, muddy black Harley-Davidson in front of it, I found it with no trouble. But I grimaced; I had not wanted to contend with Ezra Upchurch on this night. Only Lita. Only Luis.

  I might have driven on past it, in fact, if at that moment Luis and Lita had not come around the side of the trailer from the back and spotted me. Lita had a big plastic bowl in her hands, which she tossed into the air when she saw me, and left to plop to earth while she streaked, squealing, toward the Cherokee. Luis held a cell phone to his ear, and when he saw me he smiled and said something rapidly into it and shoved it into his pocket and trotted behind her toward my car. So, feeling as shy as a teenager calling at a boys’ dormitory, I got out of the Jeep and went toward them across the tiny lawn.

  Lita hit me around the knees and almost knocked me over, gurgling with laughter, and Luis caught her by the back of her T-shirt and restrained her while he put a big arm around my shoulders and drew me close in an exuberant hug.

  “Ay, querida, but you are a sight for sore eyes,” he yelled. “And an answer to a prayer. And whatever else a brighter mind than mine could come up with. Come in. We’ve got real pizza from the real pizza place in the village. None of that frozen stuff for the likes of us.”

  He walked me into the trailer, and I looked around, Lita hanging from my hand and chattering so fast in Spanish that she sounded like an Alvin and the Chipmunks recording. The inside was much more spacious than I would have thought, and sparsely furnished, but with obviously new furniture and some taste. A huge television set had pride of place, with a tomato-colored recliner and a rocking chair drawn up to it, and on a big red-plaid sofa there was a litter of books and toys and crayon drawings. On the small pine dining table was a welter of maps and charts and books and a half-empty bottle of red wine: Luis’s territory, obviously. The real pizza box sat on a shining Formica counter, smelling so good that I felt water gather in my mouth.

  “We almost ate it before we went to feed the raccoons, but Lita wanted to wait,” Luis said. “She knew something I didn’t, obviously.”

  “Told you she’d come,” Lita said, rolling her bright almond eyes at her grandfather. “Told you.”

  “So you did. Fourteen million times,” he said. “She’s wanted to call you for at least three days. She was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find us. But I thought you might need a little time to yourself.…”

  Of course, Ezra would have told him about the deed to the island, and the march, all of it.

  “Where’s Ezra?” I said. “I saw his machine outside.”

  “He swapped it for my truck for the night,” Luis said, grinning. “He’s got stuff to haul for the big doings tomorrow, and I’ve always wanted to get that hawg off by myself.”

  “And have you?”

  “Yep. Lita and I went to the beach this afternoon. It was great. Just like Easy Rider. So. Not that you need a reason, and I hope it’s purely because you’ve missed us, but I suspect there’s more to this than a social call. Can we do something for you?”

  His words were light, but his voice was gentle and his face concerned, and I felt a prickle of weak tears in my eyes, and turned away.

  “Not really,” I said. “I just was…at loose ends, sort of, and I guess…I think I might have been a little lonesome out there in the marsh. I’m awfully used to seeing this monkey face around by now.”

  And I gave Lita’s hand a squeeze. She squeezed back, hard.

  “A bad time for you, Caro, and that’s no joke,” Luis said soberly. “A huge betrayal. A huge loss. A true evil. I would have given a lot to be able to prevent it.”

  “It wasn’t really deliberate, Luis,” I said, surprising myself. “I know Clay feels bad about it, too. I think…he just can’t see any other way right now.”

  “Then he’s a worse fool than I thought he was. But I wasn’t talking about Clay. I know the poor stupid bastard’s hurting. Look what he stands to lose…No, I meant our friend Hayes. Goebbels. Iago. He who smiles and smiles, and is a villain. Of course Mengele should have told you the minute he found out about that deed, and fired Iago’s ass, and taken you over there with him to watch him personally fire that sucker. But his head’s so fucked up by all those years of playing God that he really thinks he created the heavens and the earth, and now he’s got to save his holy empire or he won’t get to be God anymore. He might have come around, given time, but ol’ Iago did him out of any leeway he had. He’s no fool, Iago. He always knew who would inherit the earth.”

  “Who?”

  “South Ward. You start screwing around with the wilderness and South Ward is two steps behind you, sure as gun’s iron. I’ve always known that. Those folks over in Dayclear have always known that. We know that at best we’re guests on that land. Nobody owns it but the gators and the crabs and the coons.”

  “And the panther,” Lita piped. “Don’t forget the panther, Abuelo!”

  I look at Luis in surprise.

  “We heard him, Lita and I. We heard him early in the morning, right before we found the mare and her baby. I’d heard of him, of course, but this time I heard that sucker. Lita did, too. You don’t forget that. She’s right. I reckon that’s who owns this island. Pity Mengele forgot that.”

  I turned my head away, thinking of the night we had heard the panther, Clay and I. It had been the beginning of it all, of everything.

  “Clay heard him, too, once,” I said. It was almost a whisper. I thought my throat would burst with pain.

  “He forgets fast then,” Luis said. “That cat ought to put his snout right down Mengele’s britches and roar. Look, Caro, let me put a proposition to you. Not that kind, though don’t I wish. It’s this. I just got a call from…a person in Columbia, somebody I’ve been looking for but wasn’t sure existed. If he’s willing to do what he says he will, we’ve got this botulism business nailed. Name of seller, name of buyer, dates, places, the whole nine yards. It could lift that march tomorrow right up into the stratosphere. It could put the blame right where it ought to be, too…and that ought to get ol’ Clay baby off the hook a little with the media. But I’m going to have to leave right now and go meet him; he won’t talk over the telephone, and he won’t talk at all unless he sees the color of my cash first. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of somebody to stay with Lita; I don’t want her over on the island until this is all over, and I don’t know anybody over here who could come on such short notice. Lottie will come get her first thing in the morning and take her to her studio; she’s keeping Mark Bridges, too, until the crowd’s dispersed, but Lottie
’s…tied up tonight. I’d get Auntie, but she, by God, wants to march and I think she should. So…do you think you could possibly baby-sit for me, just till Lottie gets here in the morning? I’ll probably be going straight to the bridge from Columbia. I wouldn’t ask you except that I don’t like thinking of you over there by yourself in that house, just sitting there and waiting for us to barbecue Clay right under your nose. In fact, I think you ought to be off the island completely till tomorrow night. Somebody in that pack of press jackals is bound to get wind of where you are and come beating on your door. I was going to tell Lottie to go get you in the morning and take you over to her studio till the dust settles, anyway. Could you stay here, do you think? It’s a lot to ask of you, I know, to help us sink your husband.…”

  He looked intently into my face and then looked away.

  “It was a shitty idea,” he said. “I’m sorry, Caro. Please forget I even mentioned it. I’m as bad as Ezra, trying to get you to march with us.…Fuck.”

  “No,” I heard myself say. “I’d love to stay with Lita. You need to do this. Do it for the folks at Dayclear and the ponies; do it for Nissy and Yambi. You’re right. If it was Hayes, God help him, then everybody ought to know it was. Apparently I don’t know my husband as well as I thought I did, but I do know that he would never on this earth harm those horses, or let anybody do it for him. Do it for me if you can’t do it for Clay. Please, Luis.”