Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  He took a deep breath and nodded. He turned to Lita.

  “Will you stay with Caro and not give her any grief about going to bed, and not pester her for more than three stories?”

  “I promise,” Lita said. “She can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa, like you do. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. You said fuck, Abuelo.”

  “I did, and I should know better. I owe the jar a nickel. Go cut you and Caro a piece of pizza while she walks me out to the Harley. Look, Lita, I’m going to wear Uncle Ezra’s helmet and leather jacket; will I look like James Dean, do you think?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I am too old for this. But I can’t wait to straddle that hawg and eat that asphalt up. Think of it, Caro, a breath-held crowd waiting at the bridge, and I come thundering in on that thing with the proof of the pudding in my pocket…What more could a man ask?”

  “Brains enough to be careful?” I ventured. “I don’t like the sound of this clandestine stuff, Luis. If your guy knows that kind of stuff, he’s a criminal himself. Are you meeting him in a safe place?”

  “Deep in the sewers of Columbia at midnight,” he said. “No, really. I’m meeting him at the VFW hut in the middle of the parking lot, with a fais-do-do going on inside. He’s going to wear a red carnation in his navel and I’m going to carry a rose in my teeth. The worst danger is that he’ll try to kiss me, and I can always claim sexual harassment.”

  “Then hit the road, fool,” I said as we walked out into the night. Dark had fallen and the thin curl of moon had swollen and leaned closer. Someone nearby had planted Confederate jasmine; the sweet, tender smell almost took my breath. Even this far inland, the kiss of salt lay on the wet little night wind.

  He pulled on the helmet and shrugged into the jacket. He should have looked ludicrous beyond words, but he did not; he looked enormous and rock-solid and somehow both boyish and dangerous, going off on this extravagant quest to save something not his own. But then, had that not been almost his whole life?

  “Do you remember, you told me once to find what I would die for and then live for it?” I said. “What is it you would die for, Luis? What is it you live for? What is it you ride this silly thing to Columbia at night for?”

  He was not smiling when he looked at me.

  “For the quaint, old-fashioned notion that people ought to be able to live wherever the fuck they choose,” he said. “I ought to be able to go back to Cuba if I want to. That little girl in there at least ought to have a choice. The people in Dayclear should, too. You, too, for that matter. A great deal of this business is so that you can live on that island of yours if you want to. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I guess I didn’t, really,” I said, around the cold salt lump in my throat.

  He reached out and touched my hair.

  “I don’t know what will happen with you,” he said. “I do know that things change. I think things may change for you. I don’t know what that means yet. But when I get back we will talk about it. Can we do that, Caro? Can we talk about that?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  He stood still with his hand on my head, and then he leaned over and kissed me very chastely and softly on the forehead.

  “Sleep well with my little girl,” he said. “And I, I will ride like the wind until my great steed Rosinante brings me back to you.”

  “Get out of here.” I laughed, choking on it.

  He swung himself into the seat of the Harley and stomped down on the gas pedal. It roared into life, throbbing and bucking to get away, to ride out into the vast black night, to spit out the wind. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx, jerked back his thumb in the old WWII pilot’s salute, and gunned the Harley. It leaped forward, roaring, and I watched it as he leaned into the turn at the bottom of the street, raised a hand, and was gone.

  When I got back into the trailer, the pizza was waiting, smoking hot, on two flowered Melamine plates, and The Lion King was beginning on the TV screen.

  “I always work the VCR,” Lita said, settling herself into the rocking chair with her plate of pizza. “It makes Abuelo say fuck, and then he has to put a nickel in the jar. It’s half-full now.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” I said, beginning to laugh. And that is what we had for our supper, Estrellita Esteban and I: pepperoni pizza from the real pizza place, with no anchovies, and laughter, and a golden lion cub growing through pain and despair into lordliness.

  Lottie came so early the next morning that I was still in Luis’s old seersucker robe, putting on coffee, and Lita was still asleep. She had had a restless night, muttering and whimpering, and I had heard her from the sofa bed in the little living room and gone in to her, and finally, when I could neither fully wake her nor quiet her, crawled in beside her. She had subsided then, but had rolled against me and clung there, and I was tired and sweaty when the first graying of the dark outside the high little windows came. I got up carefully, so as not to wake her, and found the robe hanging behind the bathroom door and put it on over my underwear, and went into the kitchen. The robe smelled of Luis and somehow of peat moss, an intimate, earthy smell. I drew it close around me in the morning chill.

  When I had peered out to see who was banging so peremptorily on the trailer door and let Lottie in, she grinned, in spite of what was obviously one of her more advanced hangovers.

  “Looks better on you than it does on me,” she said, indicating the robe. I felt myself color, and she said, “Oh, for God’s sake. I know he isn’t here. He called me on his way out of town last night and told me you were staying, and to come over and get you all going early so you wouldn’t run into reporters at the bridge. They’re sure to know your car, and they know about Lita. He doesn’t want them near either of you. You ought to know, too, that he and I are what they customarily call just good friends now.”

  “God, Lottie, I don’t care…”

  “Just so you know.”

  I gave her coffee while I went to wake Lita. She was fussy and petulant, and clung to me. I had never heard her whine before, but her manner this morning was that of a much younger child, and I automatically felt her forehead to see if she had a fever. She did not. Well, she was only a small child after all; she was entitled to a small regression now and then. I had never really seen her in any state but her customary cheeky, sunny one.

  “Got up on the wrong side of the bed, did we?” I said, and she looked in fretful puzzlement at each side of her double bed.

  “It’s just an expression that means fussy,” I said. “That’s okay. I do it, too, sometimes. Let’s get some breakfast in you. Lottie’s here to take you over to her studio with Mark. You all are going to have a great time. You might not know it, but it’s a real honor. She doesn’t invite many people over there. She’s a famous artist, you know.”

  She was unimpressed.

  “Don’t want to go,” she said, scrubbing fitfully at her eyes with her fists. “Want to go with you. And I want to go with Abuelo and ride the hawg in the march. I want to go home, too.”

  “Well, you can’t do all three at the same time,” I said in the tone I remembered employing with Carter and Kylie when total unreason ruled. “You were all excited about going to Lottie’s last night, to play with Mark. You can’t come with me this morning, but we’ll do something tomorrow maybe, or the next day. Where’s home, Lita?”

  I should not have had to ask, and felt a frisson of anger.

  “Over there,” she said sullenly, jerking her thumb back toward the road south. I knew that she meant the island. What would happen when Luis took her away from there, as he was bound to do sooner or later? Where would home be then?

  “How about we go see Yambi tomorrow?” I said. “I hear he’s been asking for you.”

  “Promise?”

  “I’ll do my best. It’s up to your grandfather.”

  “He’ll let me,” she said, some of her sunniness returning. I thought that he would, too.
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br />   Lottie made appalling cinnamon toast while I got Lita into her miniature jeans and T-shirt and running shoes. When we were ready to go, Lottie said, “Why don’t you pick out a few toys to take with you?” and Lita scampered off to gather her treasures.

  Lottie turned to me.

  “I heard about the island. The deed thing, I mean. I know somebody who does freelance hits, and in case you think I’m kidding, I’m not. He would probably do Clay and Hayes for the price of one. Are you going to get through this, Caro? Why don’t you come back with us today? It’s not going to be pleasant, even over where you are. You’re bound to hear some of it, and there’s always the possibility that some of those assholes will track you down at the house. The patrician, betrayed, environmentalist wife…you’re honey for the flies. Just for today? Luis and Ezra will keep them away from you after this, but they’ll be tied up today.…”

  “I can take care of myself,” I said. “I think I could easily shoot any son of a bitch who comes over there with a camera. I wouldn’t mind a bit. I don’t need Ezra and Luis to fight my battles for me.”

  “Well, don’t shoot anybody. Ain’t none of them worth jail. Save the bullets for Hayes. Somebody ought to do it, sure enough. That poor old mare…What will you do today then?”

  “I think I might be ready to paint. If I can do that, I won’t hear anything from the bridge, and I won’t think about it.”

  “Okay, sweetie,” she said, hugging me. She felt solid and warm and smelled of bourbon. It was somehow comforting, and then I realized it was my grandfather’s smell.

  “I’m coming by after I take the children back to Dayclear tonight, though,” she said. “I’m either going to spend the night with you or drag you back to my place. There are nights it’s okay to be alone, but tonight is not one of them.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. The idea of Lottie’s formidable presence on this looming night was oddly appealing. When it was over, something very basic to the fabric of my life would have changed. I knew that. I simply was not sure what.

  It was still early when I pulled out onto 174 and drove south toward the bridge over to Peacock’s. The sky was still pink behind the line of black pines to the east, and there was little traffic in the opposite direction. The islanders who worked in Charleston would just be leaving now. I thought that I would get home and take a long, hot, sulfurous shower and make myself some real coffee and dig out my camera and take the Whaler far up the creek. The eleven o’clock news last night had spoken of a powerful cold front working its way east through Alabama and Georgia, and predicted strong thunderstorms and high winds by the evening of the next day. I knew that meant a return, however briefly, of cold weather. We were not done with winter yet. This might be the last of the enchanted gold-green light on the marshes for several weeks. I remembered a poem Robert Frost had written about that first gilded green of spring. It ended, “Nothing gold can stay.”

  The line almost brought tears to my eyes as I drove. Why couldn’t the gold stay? Was it too much to ask?

  I crossed over to Peacock’s Island and resolutely looked neither right nor left as I headed west, so that I would not have to see the company’s offices or the artful stand of tropical plantings that led to the beach road and our house. I stepped on the gas when I got through the traffic circle; I had no wish to meet the first of the media gathered at the bridge over to the island. But when I approached it, it lay empty and dreaming in the first sun, only a couple of Gullah crabbers tossing their lines over into the black water. I lifted a hand and smiled, and they smiled back. I knew them but did not remember their names. I knew that they lived in Dayclear, though. I wondered how much longer they would be free to crab in this little estuary.

  I flicked on the radio and found the station in Charleston that played baroque music in the early mornings. “Spring” from The Four Seasons uncurled into the Jeep, and I smiled. I turned off onto my dirt road and swept around the curve to the live oak hammock in a shower of glittering notes.

  Clay’s Jaguar was parked under the trees. Even as my lips framed the word “shit,” my heart leaped like a gaffed mullet in my chest.

  I stopped the Jeep a little way from the Jaguar and looked around. I saw no evidence that he was in the house; it was still dark, and no smoke came from the chimney. I did not see him on the hammock or out on the boardwalk to the dock, either. I sat still, trying to decide how I would think about this, how I would act when I saw him. I could not even imagine why he was here, on this of all days.

  I decided on Dorothy Parker.

  “What fresh hell is this?” I said aloud, in what I hoped was a coolly amused voice, as I got out of the Jeep.

  No one answered me but an outraged squirrel in the live oak over my head.

  I was almost up to the steps when I heard the faint putt-putt of the Whaler out on the creek. I went down to the edge of the boardwalk over the reeds and dark water and stood watching as it came out of the glitter of the morning sun and glided to rest against the dock. He got out and stood looking toward me. He was bathed in the dancing light, as he had been the first time I saw him, and he was as tall and flame-tipped and lithe as he had ever been then. This was not fair. I felt a great, simple, abject grief start in my chest.

  “I want that back,” I whispered aloud. “Oh, I want that back.”

  I went to meet him.

  I was perhaps fifteen feet away from him before his face came clear out of the dazzle, and I gasped aloud and stopped. Clay had been crying. His long face was as red and congested as Carter’s when he was a toddler and just coming out of a spell of weeping; his eyes were bloodshot and slitted, and the silver scum of dried tears glittered in the silvery stubble on his chin and cheeks. His hair had not been combed, and was wildly tangled from the wind on the Whaler.

  I had never seen Clay cry. Not like this. I simply looked at him.

  “I couldn’t find you,” he said, and his lips shook, and his voice broke.

  “I wasn’t here,” I said stupidly.

  He shook his head hard, and tears flew out into the warming air. His face contorted and he turned it away.

  “I know. I know you were over at Cassells’s trailer. I went over there, but the lights were out.…”

  “He wasn’t there, Clay,” I said. “He went to Columbia. I was staying with Lita.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean I thought you…I just…I just wanted to see your car, to know you were safe somewhere. I thought you’d have called by now.…I came over here to wait for you.”

  As if by agreement, we began to walk back toward the house. The boardwalk squeaked and swayed under our weight. We walked side by side, but we did not touch. None of this felt at all real. I might have been watching a movie of myself, walking along a boardwalk on a spring morning with a man who could not stop crying. A man I knew only slightly, from another time.

  “How did…how did you know where I was?” I said, more to break the silence than anything. I simply could not get a sense that this was my husband.

  “Ezra Upchurch came to see me last night,” he said. “He told me. Among other things. Christ, if that wasn’t a scene…it’s two in the morning and Ezra Upchurch is knocking on the door yelling for me to open up. I’m surprised somebody didn’t call the cops.”

  “Ezra?” I said stupidly. “I didn’t know you knew Ezra.”

  “I guess he figured it was time he introduced himself,” Clay said, and to my surprise began to laugh. It was not so far removed from tears, that laugh, but it was a laugh. I laughed, too. I could not imagine why.

  At the beginning of the boardwalk my grandfather had built a pair of facing cypress benches, weathered now into a silky silver gray, and when we reached them he sagged onto one of them and I sat down on the other. We looked at each other across the boardwalk where we had met, all those years ago.

  “Ah, God, Caro,” he said presently. “So much shit. So much misery. So much…waste. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t. Well, I wasn’t th
inking, of course…Listen, can we talk a little bit? Will you just listen to me without saying anything? I don’t mean you should…change your mind about anything, but if you’d just listen…”

  “Clay, I will always listen to you,” I said. “When did I not?”

  “Well, do you think…could you make some coffee? I couldn’t find the cord to the pot.…”

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go to the house.”

  All the way across the grass and up the steps my heart was hammering as if it would explode in my chest. What was this? What could this possibly mean?

  I made the coffee while he took a shower. I saw that he had slept on the sofa under a welter of quilts. The fire was cold and sour, and I relit it. It was really too warm for it, but I wanted the intimate hiss and snicker of it, and the dancing light. The living room was still in darkness, from the sheltering oaks. I turned on the lamps and brought out a tray of coffee and some of the Little Debbies that were Esau and Janie Biggins’s sole gesture toward breakfast food.

  He came into the room in an old pair of madras shorts and a sweatshirt. His feet were bare and his hair was wet and standing straight up in spikes from the towel. The sweatshirt was a horror of Carter’s that said, RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD. I was sure that Clay had no idea it said anything at all. I felt wild, braying laughter behind the tears in my chest. I bit my lips and waited.

  “All right,” he said on a long, exhaled breath. “Listen. The press thing at the bridge…the march, you know…that’s off. Ezra’s Washington people have been calling all night. And the project, the development, you know, the Dayclear thing…that’s off, too. I pulled out of it. I called the SouthWard guys at the guest house while Ezra was still at the house and told them to hit the road. He wouldn’t leave until I’d given him the deed and he’d torn it up. Burned it, too. He’s one tough cookie, Ezra Upchurch. And he still wouldn’t leave until I’d called Hayes and fired him. That did it, though. After that we broke out the Glenfiddich and drank until about four, and then he left to get things straightened out with the press, and I went on over to Edisto, and then came back here. I hadn’t been out on the water for fifteen minutes before you came.”