Low Country

ANNE RIVERS

SIDDONS

LOW COUNTRY

For Gervais, Curry, Richard,

and Hart Hagerty,

the next keepers of the Ace

Nature’s first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower

But only so an hour

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

—ROBERT FROST

Contents

ONE

I think I’ll go over to the island for a few…

1

TWO

When I was sixteen, the son of the local

undertaker…

39

THREE

When I came downstairs, showered and more or

less together,…

79

FOUR

The five rules of sleep according to Kylie Venable: 123

FIVE

I sat down abruptly on the steps and looked at… 147

SIX

This time it was Lottie who woke me.

169

SEVEN

It’s funny how a night’s sleep can change the

complexion…

203

EIGHT

In fact, he had done just that. When we got…

242

NINE

Ever since I was a small child I have had…

261

TEN

It was a curious time, the first hours of that…

304

ELEVEN

I didn’t tell him for over a week. For the…

325

TWELVE

But I did not do that, after all, because when…

357

THIRTEEN

When Ezra Upchurch set out to ruin an ass, he… 398

FOURTEEN

The storm the newscasts had promised us came

a day…

436

AUTHOR’S NOTE

462

PRAISE

464

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

COVER

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

1

I
think I’ll go over to the island for a few days
,” I said

to my husband at breakfast, and then, when he did

not respond, I said, “The light’s beautiful. It can’t last.

I hate to waste it. We won’t get this pure gold again

until this time next year.”

Clay smiled, but he did not put down his newspaper,

and he did not speak. The smile made my stomach dip

and rise again, as it has for the past twenty-five years.

Clay’s smile is wonderful, slow and unstinting and a

bit crooked, and gains much of its power from the

surrounding austerity of his sharp, thin face. Over the

years I have seen it disarm a legion of people, from

two-year-olds in mid-tantrum to Arab sheiks in same.

Even though I knew that this smile was little more than

a twitch, and with no more perception behind it, I felt

my own mouth smiling back. I wondered, as I often

do, how he could do that, smile as though

2 / Anne Rivers Siddons

you had absolutely delighted him when he had not

heard a word you said.

“There is a rabid armadillo approaching you from

behind,” I said. “It’s so close I can see the froth. It’s

not a pretty sight.”

“I heard you,” he said. “You want to go over to the

island because the light’s good. It can’t last.”

I waited, but he did not speak again, or raise his

eyes.

Finally I said, “So? Is that okay with you?”

This time he did look up.

“Why do you ask? You don’t need my permission

to go over to the island. When did I ever stop you?”

His voice was level and reasonable; it is seldom

anything else. I knew that he did not like me to go over

to the island alone, though, for a number of reasons

that we had discussed and one that we had not, yet.

The island is wild and largely undeveloped now,

except for a tiny settlement on its southwestern tip,

and there are wild animals living on it that are hostile

to humans, and sometimes dangerous. It is home to a

formidable colony of alligators, some more than twelve

feet long, and a handful of wild boar that make up in

ferocity what they lack in numbers. Rattlesnakes and

water moccasins are a given. Even the band of sullen

wild ponies that have lived there on the

Low Country / 3

grassy hummocks between the creeks and inlets since

time out of mind are not the amiable toys they seem.

A small child from the settlement was badly kicked

only last year, when he got too close to a mare nursing

her foal. Clay knows that I have been handling myself

easily and well on the island since I was a child, but

he mistrusts what he calls my impetuosity more than

he trusts my long experience and exemplary safety re-

cord.

Then there is the settlement itself, Dayclear. That

beautiful word is Gullah, part of the strange and lyrical

amalgam of West African and Colonial English once

spoken by the handful of Gullah blacks still living in

pockets of the South Carolina Lowcountry. They are

the descendants of the slaves brought here by the first

white settlers of these archipelagos and marshes, and

some of the elders still speak the old patois among

themselves. When I was a child I knew some of it

myself, a few words taught me by various Gullah

nurses and cooks, a few snatches of songs sung by

gardeners and handymen on my grandfather’s place.

I know that Dayclear means “dawn.” I have always

loved the word, and I have always been aware of the

settlement, even if I did not often visit it when I was

growing up and have no occasion to do so now. I do

know that it is made up now largely of the old, with

a preponderance of frail old women, and that some of

them must be the kin of those workers of my child-

hood, if not the actual people them

4 / Anne Rivers Siddons

selves. I know that there are virtually no young men

and women living there, since the young leave the is-

land as soon as they are physically able to do so, to

seek whatever fortunes they might find elsewhere.

There is nothing for them in Dayclear. There are chil-

dren, small ones, left behind with the old women by

daughters and granddaughters who have taken flight,

and there are sometimes silent, empty-faced young men

about, who have come home because they are in

trouble and have, temporarily, nowhere else to go, but

they do not stay long.

I have not been to the settlement for many years, as

my route across the island lies in the dry, hummocky

heart of it, and the house to which I go is at the oppos-

ite end, looking northwest toward the shore of Edisto.

But when I think of it, I feel nothing but a kind of

mindless, nostalgic sense of safety and benevolence.

Dayclear has never given me anything but nurturing

and love.

Clay fears it, though. He has never said so, but I

know that he does. I can tell; I always know when Clay

is afraid, because he so seldom is, and of almost

nothing.

“There’s nothing there that can hurt me; nobody

who would,” I have said to him. “They’re just poor old

women and babies and children.”

“You don’t know who’s back in there,” he said. “You

don’t see who comes and goes. Any

Low Country / 5

body could come across. There are places you could

wade across. Anybody could drop anchor in the Inland

Waterway and come ashore. You think everybody in

that little place doesn’t know when you’re at the house,

and that you’re by yourself? I don’t like it when you

go, Caro. But you know that.”

I did know, and do. But he does not forbid me to

go to the island. For one thing, Clay is not a forbidder;

he would find it distasteful, unseemly, to forbid his

wife anything, the operative word being distasteful.

Clay is a fastidious man, both physically and emotion-

ally.

For another thing, I own part of the island. And if

there is anything Clay respects, it is the right of eminent

domain.

But the main reason he does not want me on the is-

land alone is that he is afraid that I will drink there. I

do drink sometimes, though by no means often, but

when I do I tend to do it rather excessively. When I

am with him, at this house or the club or the town

house in Charleston, he feels that he can at least control

the consequences of my drinking, if not the act itself.

The consequences are not heinous, I don’t think; I do

not stumble and fall, or weep, or grow belligerent. But

I do tend to hug necks and kiss cheeks, and sometimes

to sit on laps, and sometimes to dance and sing, and

I imagine that to Clay these are worse than staggering

or tears. They might imply,

6 / Anne Rivers Siddons

to some who don’t know us, that I do not receive

enough affection at home. And they tend to dismay

visiting Arab sheiks. So Clay, while he says nothing to

me then or later and never has, stays close enough to

initiate damage control when he thinks it is necessary.

Perhaps if we talked about it, I could tell him that when

I am slightly drunk I feel so much better than I nor-

mally do, that I am happy, exuberant, giddy, and wish

to share the largesse with whomever is close. But we

do not talk about it. To name a demon is to make it

yours. Clay does not wish to own this particular de-

mon, and I do not wish, yet, to give it up. So we do

not speak of my drinking, though the time may come

when we have to do so. Or maybe not. I do fairly well

with it, as long as I have the island for refuge.

This is something Clay does not understand, and

will not unless I tell him: that the island is the one

place where I do not want to drink, or need to. I know

that I could probably ease his mind considerably about

my time over there if I told him so, but again, that

would mean naming the demon, and we both know

that we do not want its disruptive presence in our lives.

It would be like having to acknowledge and live with

an erratic, malicious relative who was apt to break the

china, fart in public, insult our guests, change the very

fabric and structure of our graceful lives.

So Clay goes on hating and dreading my trips

Low Country / 7

to the island but refusing to discuss them, and I go on