Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  He stopped and looked at me. I could not think of a single thing on earth to say to him.

  “Why did you fire Hayes?” I said finally.

  “Suspicion of equicide,” my husband said, and began to laugh. I did, too. We sat in the growing light of this day I had dreaded and laughed and howled and wept and sobbed and laughed some more, and pounded our thighs with our fists, and when we finally subsided, Clay began to cry again.

  I moved over to the sofa and sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulder, very tentatively. I felt that I was trying to comfort a total stranger, someone I had met on an airplane or something, who had become suddenly inconsolable. It was almost…unseemly.

  “Did you really do those things, Clay?” I said finally. “Did all that really happen?”

  His face was buried in his hands, but he nodded.

  I sat back and thought about that.

  “Then…nothing is going to happen over here. There isn’t going to be anything built on Dayclear?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you mean for now, or ever? You still own it; will you change your mind somewhere along the way? Will we go through this again?”

  He raised his head and looked at me. It was painful to look at him.

  “Caro,” he said, “Last night, when I finally lay down to try to sleep, I thought Kylie was here. I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I heard her laughing, that I heard her walking outside; I’d know her step anywhere. I thought I heard her…talking, but I couldn’t hear what she said. And when I got up to see, I heard…I heard the panther. And I knew then that if I did anything to this island I would be haunted for the rest of my life by it. I knew that it was theirs, not mine, yours and theirs, and your grandfather’s, and the Dayclear folks…I knew that I never had belonged here and never would, not the way all of you did and do. They told me that, that panther and my dead baby. I know it’s not possible, but that is what I heard. I started crying then. If I’m losing my mind…then so be it.”

  I felt joy and peace flood into my heart like an artesian well.

  “If you’re losing you mind, then I am, too,” I said. “I’ve heard her here. I’ve talked to her. I’ve thought I saw her. And Luis and Lita heard the panther the morning…that Nissy died. I think…I think…that either that panther must be about one hundred and twenty-five years old or this island knows what we need to hear, and somehow…sees that we do. In any case, it doesn’t matter. If you heard them, then maybe it can be your island, too.”

  He shook his head, no.

  “But I’d like…I’d like to stay here on it with you, if you think you could let me do that. I thought you’d gone, Caro. I didn’t think you would come back. I didn’t think I could live with that.”

  I reached out and touched a tear track on his face. He covered my hand with his and pressed it into his bristled cheek.

  “We’ll lose everything, won’t we?” I said, not pulling away. “If you don’t do Dayclear? The company, the house…Is that why you’re crying? Surely, Clay, there’s something else you can do, some other way you can put your gift to work…and I don’t care about the other stuff. I can live over here for the rest of my life. I was going to; I thought that was what I would do. I can sell my paintings. We could manage.…”

  He shook his head and grinned, a small, watery grin.

  “We’ll do okay,” he said. “I’ll find somebody decent to sell the company to, somebody who’ll be generous; there have been good offers along the way. The Peacock Island Plantation Company is not chopped liver. I have a ton of stock. We could keep the house if you wanted to, but somehow I don’t think I could live there now, and I was sure you wouldn’t want to. Carter may want to be a part of it, and we can work that out with the new owners. I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff; it’s history. I want to see if I can earn my right to be part of this over here. That will be enough to hold me a few thousand years. No, what got to me was…I guess the thought of Kylie, and how she would feel about what I had become, and then that poor goddamned horse, and the colt…Kylie loved those horses…and Hayes. Hayes was my friend, Caro. Hayes was my first friend in this place, almost my first friend period.…”

  “Did he admit…that he had anything to do with the horses?”

  “He didn’t say he didn’t. He just blustered and threatened and yelled; he really lost it when I told him there wasn’t going to be any project. Said I was ruining him. Said I had betrayed him, after everything he’d done for me. I remembered what you said about Becket…I think he did it, or had it done. God help him for that.”

  “There may be proof by now that he was behind it, Clay,” I said. “That was why Luis went to Columbia. He has a contact there who’s going to tell him, who can name names and places and all that. He was going to bring it back with him for the press conference. You should have it soon.…”

  He turned his face away.

  “I don’t need it. I think I knew when you told me. Hayes…something has eaten Hayes up inside, like a worm. There’s nothing left but rottenness. I don’t know why I never saw it happening. He’s going with South Ward, by the way; it’s been in the works for months. He hit me with that, too. He was to deliver the project and then go in as chief counsel and a managing partner. He’d have been out of Peacock’s before the dust settled. The deal was that he’d be able to stay in Charleston, too; Hayes had it all figured out.”

  “Well, he’ll have to refigure then.…”

  “No, I think they’ll still take him. Oh, he won’t be chief anything, and he’ll have to move to Atlanta, and that will kill him and Lucy, and he’ll never make anywhere near the money he stood to make this way…but Hayes is good about finding venture capital. He ought to be able to smell out enough for South Ward so that they’ll keep him. I think, for Hayes, living in a suburb of Atlanta near a strip shopping mall and being a middle-level money cruncher for South Ward will be worse than jail. Maybe there’s some justice in the world after all. I’d like to think there’s a little, after what I’ve done.…”

  “But if you’ve pulled out of the Dayclear project, what harm have you done?” I said, reaching out to turn him around so that he faced me. His shoulder felt familiar again all of a sudden, muscle and bone that I knew.

  He turned. His face shocked me. I felt my breath die in my chest.

  “Ezra came for another reason,” he whispered.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  And that is when he took both my hands in his cold ones, and told me that Luis Cassells had spun the Harley off a long curve halfway between Edisto and Columbia near midnight the night before, and crashed into a tree, and died, the state patrol thought, on impact.

  14

  The storm the newscasts had promised us came a day early, screaming in from the west on a fast-running river of upper air. It hit about three o’clock that afternoon, out of a sky gone inky black and lurid with flickering lightning, and stalled out over the Lowcountry. It crouched there for twenty-four hours, alternately flooding the sea and marshes with torrential cold rains and scourging them with great, punishing winds. Sometimes there was the spatter of hail on the house’s tin roof, and sometimes the light went queer and thick and green and Clay would stand me up and walk me hurriedly into the middle hall, where there were no windows, until the dull bellow high overhead passed and became ordinary rain again. Several tornadoes spun out of the low, flat clouds; I learned later that North Charleston had been nipped by one, and a couple of blocks were treeless and shingleless in Peacock Plantation, and the usual trailer park casualties had occurred. Much later Lottie told me that the trailer that Luis and Lita had borrowed was rocked off its foundation, though no real damage was done. It was as if the very air howled in grief and outrage for Luis Cassells.

  I remember very little of the storm. For almost its day-and-night-long duration, I cried.

  I began to cry at Clay’s words that morning. I felt as though a lance had gone straight into a monstrous sac of pain deep wit
hin me and let it erupt. I cried great, shuddering sobs and moans that rose sometimes into real screams, and gasped for breath that would not come until my chest heaved and black specks danced before my eyes, and then sobbed again. I cried so much that I thought I would die of it; I did not think that the human heart and lungs could process that many tears, withstand that kind of savage, battering grief. When I stopped momentarily, gasping and rocking back and forth, I could feel a profound aching deep in the muscles of my stomach and under my ribs that felt mortal. I frightened myself badly with the velocity and duration of my grief and my inability to stop it, and I know that I frightened Clay. After an hour or so of rocking me in his arms on the sofa while the world outside blazed with lightning and boomed with thunder, and I wept, he picked me up and walked with me into the bedroom and laid me under the covers and crawled in beside me. For the rest of that roaring afternoon, he held me hard against him and I cried in my grandfather’s old bed.

  Sometimes, in a momentary lull, I would try to explain to him that it was not just for Luis Cassells that I cried, and I knew that that was true, although the thought of that lonely death on a dark country roadside would send me back into a fury of tears whenever it came, unbidden, into my mind.

  “It’s everything, Clay,” I would hiccup. “It feels like it’s just everything that ever happened to me. He was never…like that…to me. It’s just…he gave me back Kylie, in a way. He showed me how to let her go so she could come back. And, Clay, he showed me how to stop the drinking; I haven’t drunk anything since way before he…” And the tears would start again, endlessly, endlessly.

  “I know,” he would murmur against my hair. “I know. I know who you’re crying for. You never did, did you? It’s all right. Cry all you need to.”

  He didn’t know, not really; I did cry for Kylie, of course, but through all of that vast storm of anguish I felt her, that fiery living kernel of her, within me, burning steadily. I cried, I think, for not having gotten her back sooner, and I cried for Nissy and her colt, and I cried for the awful, slinking thing that had ripped Clay away from me and had given me back this man who, even while I clung to him, was a stranger to me. I cried for the life that I had not even liked very much, perhaps, but that had been the one I knew. I cried for the fear that my foolishness had permitted the Gullahs of Dayclear. I cried for the gangling, vulnerable teenager who had grown to manhood waiting for me to really see him again. I cried for the man who had grown so nearly old waiting for the same thing. I even cried for Hayes Howland, for the young Hayes in tennis whites who had brought me my husband on a summer day.

  All that I knew. Still, I could not stop.

  Late in the afternoon the phone began to ring and people began to come to the house. Clay would leave me for a moment, to talk in low tones on the phone or to whisper hurriedly to whomever stood in the streaming doorway, but he always came back and got into bed with me again.

  “Okay,” he would say, pulling me against him. “Let ’er rip.” And I did.

  It was a strange state; in a way it was like the feverish fugue state in which I had painted that night before Ezra and Lottie had come. I seemed mired in the same fireshot old darkness, though I realized on some level that it was only the lightning outside, and the flickering of the fire in the little bedroom fireplace. I saw images and heard things with preternatural clarity: I heard Ezra’s voice once, from the living room, talking about the funeral service for Luis, and I heard Sophia Bridges’s cool clear voice saying, “…I’ll take her, of course, but it isn’t me she wants,” and knew that she was speaking of Lita, and could not do anything at all about it. Lita…I found that I could not even think of Lita.

  Later, in the full night, I heard Sophia again, telling Clay to give me a cup whenever I would take it, and knew that Auntie Tuesday had sent her magical tea, and actually smiled to myself before the tears started again. And I heard her telling him about Lita, about the horror that had taken her mother and baby brother and her journey to Luis, and about her silence. I gathered that she was silent again, once more at Auntie’s house, and that the tea and the broth were not working, and that everyone was frightened for her. I was, too, but I could not make my muscles move me toward the edge of the bed.

  “Ezra and I wanted to bring her over here, but Auntie says let Caro be. She says a lot of poison has got to come out before she can help Lita or anybody else. She says give her the broth and the tea until tomorrow and then we’ll see. It’s Caro’s time now. Auntie will tend to Lita.”

  Presently she went away, back into the storm, and Clay came into the room with a tray of Auntie’s steaming fiddlehead broth, and I took it from him and drank it down greedily. I knew that it would spin me down into sleep. I thought if I cried anymore I would surely die.

  Sleep came then. A sleep unlike any other I have ever known. In it fires burned and drums beat and animals flickered through forests of a primary greenness I had never known, and children ran laughing and shrieking, and hot blue seas beat on yellow sand, and great, hectic flowers hung from vines like boa constrictors. I remember thinking, as you do in dreams, that this was Eden, and I must be very careful or I would be cast out of it. It was not a peaceful Eden, not sweet, not idyllic, but it was so ravenously alive and exuberant in its fecundity that I could almost feel the fabric of a still-wet new world forming itself around me.

  I woke the next morning with tears still damp on my face, but this time they were tears of a fierce joy. I knew, without knowing how, that for a time I would not cry again.

  I was alone in the tumbled bed. I stretched long and hard, feeling the soreness around my chest and diaphragm muscles from the storms of tears, and listened for the storm outside. It had slunk off in the night, leaving only a steady rain to patter on the roof. Even in my drowsing state I knew that it would be a cold rain. Spring had left us on the wings of the storm.

  “Breakfast,” Clay said, coming into the room with a tray, and I sat up. He was in the ratty old terry cloth robe he kept out here, and there were damp comb tracks in his hair. He was freshly shaved, too, but his eyes were wary and darkly shadowed, and the muscles of his jaw were as slack as if they had been pounded. I doubted that he had slept at all.

  He brought coffee and pastries that I recognized as Janie Biggins’s cream cheese turnovers, and orange juice. And he brought a damp washcloth and a mirror and comb and a long-sleeved flannel nightgown smelling of mothballs.

  “Good morning,” I tried to say, but my voice was a painful husk in my sore throat.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “You’ll bust something for good.”

  He handed me the hot washcloth and I scrubbed my face with it, then looked into the mirror and flinched. A wild-haired, slit-eyed, mottled-cheeked witch looked back at me. I combed the snarls out of my hair and tied it back with the shoelace he had found, and took a long, scorching swallow of the coffee.

  “My God,” I croaked. “That was…extraordinary. I’m sorry, Clay. I had no idea…I don’t know what…”

  “You’re entitled,” he said. “As long as you give me an hour’s notice if you think you’re going to do it again. I thought you were dying. I thought you were just going to…cry up your insides and die. So did everybody else. Only Ezra’s aunt seemed to know what to do for you. Is her name really Tuesday?”

  “It really is. She’s a conjure woman, they say. A healer. And she can heal. I’d take anything she gave me, even if it was green and smoking. She sent the tea and the broth, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah. I was afraid to give it to you, but Sophia said for me to,”

  “I thought I heard Sophia. I hope…I know she resigned, Clay. I hope there’s no hard feelings between you. She’s a good person. She’s been a good friend to me.”

  “Caro, I didn’t even think about that. I don’t think she did, either. She told me some more about Luis, and about the little girl. Did I know about her? I can’t remember if you told me. God almighty, what is there left to happen to that child? We need to see
if we can do anything for her.…”

  “I’ll have to go,” I said, feeling a great, listless white fatigue wash over me. “I’ll have to go over there. Sometimes she’ll talk to me when she won’t to anybody else. I don’t know if she can get over this, though…but oh, Lord, Clay, I am just so tired.…”

  “I know. You’re not going anywhere today. Tomorrow, maybe. Carter’s coming in tonight and will be out to see you and talk to me some about what happens next; he’ll stay at the house and make the office his headquarters for a while. I don’t think I’m going back in there. He can run it. Everybody’s jobs are okay for a while, until something happens. I’m going to give him carte blanche to fire Shawna’s ass if she mouths off to him, though. Caro, I’m just amazed at that boy. He’s breathing fire to get hold of this; he really thinks he might be able to work something out with the investors so we can keep some of the Plantation. I’m going to let him try. I’m going to let him try. I’m going to sign the whole thing over to him. If it goes under the onus will be on me, not him, and if he can salvage anything, he’ll be a legend before he’s thirty. Why didn’t I know he could do this?”

  “Why didn’t I?” I whispered with my cracked voice. “He’s very like you at that age, isn’t he? I think I knew that, but not really…I haven’t been very interested in Carter for a long time. I don’t know if I can make that up to him or not.”

  “He understands. He’d heard about Luis, by the way; apparently he’s some kind of folk hero among the Gullahs and the grounds staff.”

  I nodded. They would make a song about him now, I knew, about the big Latin man who rode out on the motorcycle to save their village and died for it.