Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Oh, Luis, you idiot, I thought, the tears rising again. Why couldn’t you just have lived for it?

  I shook the tears away. I knew that they would come back, but not yet, and perhaps never again in such a surf of anguish.

  “Tell me about the funeral,” I said, and Clay did.

  They were going to bury Luis in the little old cemetery in the woods beyond Dayclear. There would be a graveside service only, and Ezra would preach it. I was invited to come, and Lottie Funderburke, but no other white people would be there. Clay was not invited.

  “Well, I shouldn’t be,” he said. “I didn’t know him. And yeah, they know by now that I’m not going ahead with the project, but I haven’t given them much reason to trust me. I’m going to have to earn that, if I ever can. It wouldn’t be right for me to be there. I wouldn’t go if they asked me. But I want you to, if you’re up to it. And Caro…afterward, you do whatever you need to do.”

  I looked at him.

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Anything at all.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, I slept again, off and on. The rain stopped and a cold wind blew the tattered clouds away, and a hard blue sky glittered like steel over the marsh. Clay built up the fire in the living room and we moved there on the sofa, and between my naps we talked. Not about much of import, and not for long, for the sleep would take me almost in mid-sentence, and I would go under. But we talked. It was a beginning.

  Out of that afternoon came one thing that shines for me like a Christmas star. We decided that the entire island, “my” part of it, would become an irrevocable trust called the Elizabeth Kyle Venable Foundation, and that it would hold the land as it was, against any development, in perpetuity. It was Clay’s idea. I did not doubt that it would happen. This was not the same man I had left in his office a few days back, calling angrily after me.

  Early that evening Carter came. I was asleep on the sofa and could not seem to wake enough to do anything but smile at him and hold him as he bent over me. He looked so like the young Clay that it was almost laughable; the same messianic glint in his blue eyes, the same hunger as he looked out over the darkening marsh and creek.

  “I hope you never lose the look in your eyes, but you can’t have my island,” I said sleepily to him.

  “I don’t want it, Ma,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “Gon’ have my own island.”

  I slept again. When I woke it was to a cold, blowing blue morning, with the marsh grass rippling silver before the wind. The gold was gone. January was back, and Luis Cassells’s funeral loomed like a great, dark rock.

  I drove to Dayclear alone, and parked the car at the Bigginses’s store. No one was there and it was locked. I knew that all of Dayclear would be at the cemetery except Auntie Tuesday. Sophia had called that morning and told me that Auntie was staying with Lita, and asked that I stop by on my way to the service.

  I walked down the rutted road, Clay’s down jacket pulled tight against the cutting wind. I dreaded this visit. Sophia had said that Lita was very bad and Auntie was worried, but she had not said in what way the child was damaged. I knew, though: the great, dead silence would be back. Of course it would. Lita had lost the one great, fine, solid thing she had left in the world.

  “Has she asked for me?” I said to Sophia, dreading the burden of Lita’s need, for I still felt frail and hollow and as transient as milkweed. But she had not.

  “She hasn’t spoken. She hasn’t moved. And she hasn’t slept. This is for two days now, Caro,” Sophia said. “She lies in Auntie’s bed all curled up like a fetus, and she just stares at the wall. Auntie says she doesn’t think she’s closed her eyes since Lottie brought her. She won’t take the tea or the broth. She’s like she’s dead.”

  “What will happen to her?” I whispered in pain.

  “I don’t know. Auntie can’t keep her forever; this is wearing her out, and she’s God knows how old. Ezra doesn’t know of anybody in Cuba, but he’s going to get his people to look around in Miami and see if there’s anybody who can take her. I might sometime in the future; Mark’s crazy about her, but I don’t know yet what we’re going to be doing after this, and if there’s anything she doesn’t need it’s more uncertainty, more dislocation. I could wring Luis’s neck if he hadn’t already done it. Anybody responsible for a child has no business running off in the middle of the night on a motorcycle…”

  I agreed with her, but I did not want to hear any such talk about Luis.

  “Well, she has a hero for a grandfather. That’s no small thing, is it?” I said crisply.

  She laughed a little.

  “No. I guess not. It’s just that a dead hero isn’t going to take care of her right now, is he?”

  So I walked the few muddy yards to Auntie Tuesday’s house in pain and dread of what I would find. I did not know if I could get through the funeral without the endless salt surf of the tears breaking over me again, much less take the weight of this mute, shattered child.

  Auntie was in her rocking chair before the roaring stove. The little shack was dim and warm to stuffiness, but it felt good. Auntie smiled up at me but did not get up, and I saw that she was weary down to the very bird’s bones of her. I wondered how long she could withstand the sucking tiredness before she simply crumpled before it like tissue. Ezra would have to get her some help when this funeral was over; bring in a nurse or a girl from another village, something. She was simply too frail to tend this stricken child.

  “How you doin’, chile?” she said, and I sat down opposite her on the old rump-sprung Morris chair.

  “I’m better than I was, thanks to your tea and your soup,” I said. “I was in awful shape, Auntie. I should have been over here helping you, but I was…I don’t know. Almost crazy, or something. I think you saved my silly life.”

  “No, you find the way to do that by yo’self,” she said. “I just hurry it along a little. You need to git them tears out; I’ve knowed that ever since yo’ baby died. And Luis, mmm, mmmm. He’s one of God’s good ones. We gon’ miss him, yes, we are. You done right to cry for him. I cried, too. We all did. I just wish his grandbaby could cry for him, but she in there like a little stone baby. Don’t look like any of the old things gon’ work for her now.”

  “You want me to go see if she’ll talk to me?”

  “Not till after the service,” she said. “You needs to go to that. You needs to bear witness with the others. After that you come on back here and we’ll see does she want to talk to you. The thing is, she think you done gone, too. I say you’s coming this afternoon an’ she just look at me. I know what she thinkin’. She don’t even want to go see that colt. I know she thinks he dead, too. An’ why wouldn’t she? Everything and everybody she love done gone and left her.…”

  I looked down into my lap. The tears were very near.

  “Go on now. The cemetery’s just through them wooden gates behind my house. You cain’t see it from the road, but it there. The others are already down there, I reckon. Been workin’ since early morning.”

  I followed her directions through the wet tangle of undergrowth behind her cabin. Sure enough, there were the old rail gates, weathered silver and half-collapsed. I went through them, and pushed through a thicket of vines, and the cemetery was there.

  It was little more than a clearing in the woods, and I remembered that Ezra had said the woods around a Gullah cemetery were left thick so that the souls of the dead would not become confused and wander. Would Luis want to wander from here? I thought. He knew little else but wandering.…

  The headstones were small and listed in the wet earth, and some were very old. I could not read most of them for the encroaching moss. Most had the dried carcasses of wreaths and faded plastic flowers around them, and many were hung with what seemed to be photographs and small household objects. Hadn’t Ezra said that the Gullahs often adorned the graves of their loved dead with the things they had cherished in life? There was a bleached and unraveling rag doll on a small
grave, and a rotting pair of boots that had once been fine on another, and most of them had framed photographs that had gone yellow and brown and indistinguishable in the Lowcountry humidity. Around the perimeters of the little cemetery the sheltering moss hung down to touch the ground, like curtains that had been drawn to enclose it. How cozy it was, this tiny village of the dead of Dayclear, I thought. Nothing could reach you here.

  Almost the entire village stood around a new oblong in the black earth at the far side of the cemetery, near the hanging curtain of moss. Beside the hole a raw yellow pine coffin stood beside a mound of fresh earth. My knees felt as if they would buckle. I don’t know what I had thought, but somehow not that I would really stand and look at the box that held the still body of my friend who had never in his life been voluntarily still. Everyone looked up as I came into the clearing, and most of them smiled. The silence was as thick as air. They had been waiting for me.

  Sophia Bridges stood in the small crowd. She held her hand out to me, and I went and stood beside her. She put her arm around me. I let her take part of my weight; my knees seemed reluctant to stiffen. As the silence spun out, I made myself look at the grave and the coffin beside it. “Bear witness,” Auntie Tuesday had said, and I would do that. I would not forget this place where we were going to leave Luis.

  The hole in the earth had dark water in the bottom of it. A bucket sat beside it, and I thought that they had been trying to bail it out, but I knew that it was groundwater and that bailing was useless. The water was never far from the surface of life on this island. That was all right. Let the clean, dark old salt water take him. Better that than the arid earth of some perpetual care field in an anonymous city. I had wondered if Luis would have wanted to lie here, so far from the country that he had never, after all, gotten back to, and had thought that perhaps Ezra should have looked into a burial in Miami, among other Cubans, some of whom Luis was sure to have known. But this, this felt right.

  I looked more closely. There were a few florists’ wreaths around the grave, which had cost their senders more than the florist would ever know, but most of the flowers were cut from the first of the marsh’s blooming things: jasmine, and camellias, and great, drooping fronds of willow that were always the first to green up. In the middle of the coffin lid was a clock banked in flowers, stopped at eleven fifty-two. How did They know? I thought, and then, of course: his watch.

  The tears threatened. I turned my head. Then I looked back.

  On a small sapling that leaned over the grave someone had hung photographs. I saw one of Lita, obviously taken at some school event, solemn and alien in a dark dress with a white collar and a little wreath of flowers in her wild hair. There was one of a smiling young couple in front of a great wedding-cake church: Luis and his bride on their wedding day. Oh, dear God…the last one was a photograph of Lita on Nissy, taken at my house on the marsh. I recognized the steps up to the deck. Luis’s dark-furred hand held a rope that had been slipped around Nissy’s neck, and she had pulled it taut, but was standing, still and mulish, with the grinning child on her back. Behind them, almost out of focus, I stood, smiling, the light from the creek silhouetting my flyaway hair. I remembered that day: it had been New Year’s Eve, the day we had all spent at my house, the day of the night when I first stayed alone at the house after the great fear had begun, and did not drink. The day that Luis had told me about finding what you would die for, and then living for it…

  I felt my knees give again, and Sophia tightened her hold around my waist. I knew that she had taken the photograph and that she had probably placed it there with Luis’s other sparse treasures. I did not think, after all, that I could do this.

  As if at a signal, though I heard none, the people began to hum quietly, and to sway back and forth to the rhythm of the music. It had no words, and the tune was atonal and sounded very old in the cold, quiet glade. Outside the wall of trees the wind moaned, but in here it did not stir the bare branches. The people hummed and hummed, and I closed my eyes and let the sound take me where it would.

  When I opened them again, the humming was slowing, and then it stopped. Ezra Upchurch came out of the small crowd and stood beside the open grave. He wore overalls over a flannel shirt, clean but worn thin and faded almost patternless. He had a great, vivid camellia in his overall strap, and he looked down at the coffin of his friend and put his hand lightly on it. There were silver tear tracks on his dark face. He took a great breath and looked up at the crowd, and said, in a voice that rang out over the clearing and into the woods: “Our friend Luis felt that cycle leavin’ him, and he say, ‘Uh-oh, Lord, I think I’m coming home.’ And the Lord say, ‘I know you, Luis. Come on home…’”

  And I knew that I could not stay. Murmuring to Sophia, I turned and stumbled back out of the clearing and through the vines until I stood again in the muddy road. Tears flooded my face and soaked into the collar of Clay’s jacket, and my chest heaved and bucked. The big grief was back, but there was something else, too. It was a simple, one-celled gratitude. I had wondered if it was the right thing, laying him to rest here so far from anyone and anything that he had known. And I saw now that it was. He would be a part of them forever now. They would make him so. They would make a song of him and for him. They would make a great tale of him and for him. He would belong to them in a way that many of their own never did, and their children would sing of him, and their children, and as long as Dayclear stood, Luis Cassells would be at home.

  And Dayclear would stand.

  Looks like we’re stuck with you, I said to him in my head. Looks like you’re stuck with us. You’re ours now. Sleep tight, Luis.

  And I went back down the road to Auntie Tuesday’s house.

  “It ain’t over, is it?” she said. She had been nodding by the stove. Its red was fading to gray, and I stooped and opened the door and poked at it until it leaped into life again.

  “No. I…I just couldn’t be there anymore.”

  “That all right. We knows you come. He knows, too.”

  We sat in silence for a bit, and then I sighed and said, “I’d better go see what I can do about Lita.”

  She nodded. “I tol’ her you was on your way. She just turned her head. I ’spec it be all right now, though.”

  “Don’t count on it, Auntie.”

  “Well, you know, I seed that it was.”

  I shook my head and got up and went into the bedroom where Lita was.

  It was darkened, obviously in the hope that she would sleep, but she was not asleep. She lay very still, curled on her side, facing the door. Auntie had covered her with the same beautiful quilt she had laid over her after the mare had died, but it seemed to me that the little body under it was vastly diminished now, much smaller than the one I had seen here before. I could not make out her face, both because of the darkness and the tangle of hair that had fallen into it. But I could see the gleam of the whites of her eyes. They did not seem to blink.

  I sat down on the bed beside her. She did not move. I reached out to touch her hair, and she flinched slightly, so I let my hand fall to the quilt.

  “Hello, baby bug,” I said. “Auntie told you I’d come, didn’t she?”

  She did not move.

  “I know that you don’t feel like talking right now, and that’s okay,” I said. “It’s all right to be sad. I’m sad, too. Your abuelo was the most wonderful man, and we’ll miss him terribly. But there are still a lot of people who love you, and we’re all worried because you won’t talk to us. Do you think you might just try a word or two?”

  Nothing.

  “Well, then, I’ll just sit here with you for a while. I think Auntie’s making us some supper. In a little while I’ll go get it and bring it in on a tray, and we can have it together right here. Like a picnic. Would you like that?”

  She did not speak, but she put one hand out and clamped it onto my wrist. The strength in it was almost frightening.

  “You don’t want me to go?” I said, looking into h
er face.

  This time she shook her head, very slightly, no. No.

  “Then I won’t. Auntie will bring in our supper. Would you…” And I knew that it was something I must do. “Would you like me to stay here with you tonight?”

  She nodded her head, still not speaking. Yes. Her fingers tightened on my wrist.

  “If I stay, will you try to close your eyes and sleep a little bit? After our supper, I mean.”

  No. Her head shook back and forth, harder and harder. No. There was fear in her white-ringed eyes. Well, I could not blame her. The last time she had shut her eyes her grandfather had died.

  But we could not sit here like this forever, her hand fastened in a death grip on my arm, her eyes staring, staring.

  Then I had a thought.

  “Would you like to go see Yambi? He’s right up there behind Janie and Esau’s store, and every time anybody goes by he says, ‘Where’s Lita? Where’s Lita?’ I bet he’s lonesome, too. He lost his mommy, just like you lost your abuelo.”

  She stared into my face intently for what seemed a very long time. Then, very slowly, she pulled her arms out from under the quilt and held them out to me. I could literally see them quivering with fear, but she did it.

  I reached out and took her into my arms and held her close to me for a while, feeling the rabbitlike tremor of her heart, and then got up and carried her out into the living room. Auntie looked up and smiled.

  “MMMM hmmm,” she said. “Yessir.”

  “We’re going to walk up and see Yambi,” I said over Lita’s head. She had buried it in my neck, and was clinging for dear life. “I think we might like a bite to eat when we get back.”

  “Got me some vegetable soup and corn bread,” she said. “And got a warm yam here for that colt. Been savin’ it. He like to eat me out of yams, but this one’s special. Wait a minute, let me put somethin’ round her.”

  She pulled herself up out of the chair and tottered stiffly over to a hook behind the back door and took a thick old maroon cardigan from it and wrapped it close around the child. I settled her deeper into the circle of my arms and went out of the house into the wind.