Low Country (20 page)

so-called pain? When have I ever mentioned it to you?”

“You don’t,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “We

all know you’re too brave to mention that you’re in

mortal pain almost every waking minute of your life.

God, everybody who knows you tiptoes around scared

to death they’re going to slip and mention death or

daughters. You don’t know how many times I’ve

wanted to just ask you if your daughter was still dead.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

“How dare you?” I whispered. “How dare you talk

to me like that? I’ve never…I don’t…

172 / Anne Rivers Siddons

you talk like I
use
Kylie or something, like I…hug it to

me, like I cherish it…”

“Don’t you?” she said, and then shut her eyes. “I’m

sorry. That was rotten. But I hate to see this, Caro. I

always thought of this place as somewhere you could

come that was safe, where you didn’t feel hustled or

threatened, or need to drink. I didn’t worry about you

when I knew you were out here. I don’t want to have

to start now.”

“So don’t,” I said snippily. “How did you know I

was out here, anyway? For that matter, how did you

know I drank half a bottle of bourbon?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. As for how I knew, a little bird told

me.”

I saw it clearly, with one of those swift, untutored

leaps of connection that you make sometimes, for no

reason at all.

“He told you, didn’t he? That awful Cassells

man…Lou, or whatever his name is. Okay, Lottie, so

how do you know him? As if I had to ask.”

She grinned. It was her old grin, full and gleeful and

lewd.

“I know him just the way you think I do,” she said.

“And I’m damned glad I do. He’s as good a lay and

as good a man as I’ve met on this island in a coon’s

age, and as long as he wants to

Low Country / 173

drop on over of an evening, I’ll leave the light burning

for him. He’s not a bad art critic either, among his

other more obvious talents. I purely love fucking a man

who can talk about something afterward beside his

orgasm. I thought you all would meet eventually, but

I can’t say I had anything like this morning in mind.”

“He told you all about it, undoubtedly.”

“Of course. He has no secrets from
moi
. He was

worried about you, incidentally. He doesn’t go around

gossiping about the boss’s wife just to be doing it.”

“Oh, I’m sure not,” I said nastily. “Did he happen

to mention that he insulted me? And that he calls Clay

Mengele?”

She gave a whoop of laughter and doubled over.

“Oh, God! How perfect! I’ll never be able to look

at him with a straight face again.…”

“God
damn
it, Lottie!”

She held up one hand, palm out, gasping for breath.

“Okay,” she croaked. “All right. Truce. I’ll lay off

Men—Clay if you’ll go take a shower and toss the

booze and let me feed you lunch. When did you eat

last? Never mind. Shem just brought a mess of crabs

in. I’ll boil if you’ll crack.”

And because it was Lottie, and because I felt shamed

and diminished and out of control and frightened by

that, I did as she said. I climbed,

174 / Anne Rivers Siddons

shaking, into the shower and let the reeking hot water

wash the agues and wobbles out of my head and

muscles, and she tossed the liquor. I heard her ferret

out the remaining bottles of Wild Turkey, heard them

clink into the trash sack, heard the back door slam and

a bit later her car trunk, and knew that she would haul

them out to a Dumpster someplace. I felt better after

that, as if a loaded gun had been taken out of my

house. She was right. I had fouled my own nest last

night and today. I did not intend it to happen again.

A little later we sat at the scarred old picnic table

out behind her gas-station studio, cracking open the

hot boiled blue crabs and picking the sweet meat from

the shells. My hands and face were sticky with crab

juice, and I could feel my forehead and scalp stinging

from the spurted juice of an errant lemon. I imagined

that I smelled about as bad as I looked, but I felt much

better. Fresh crabs and Lottie have that effect on me.

Somewhere during the late lunch we had arrived at

a tacit agreement not to speak of my drinking again,

or of Clay, and I felt lulled and warmed by the sheer,

rank, earthen force that was Lottie. The hangover was

all but gone. So was the residue of last night’s eeriness,

and the near-madness. I could even speak lightly of it,

and found that I wanted to.

I told her about seeing the child in the fog, and

about sitting there in the firelight, drinking

Low Country / 175

and waiting, and about waking to the laughter, and

then running down the steps to meet not a revenant

Kylie, but a strange, near-mute Cuban child and her

black-furred grandfather. I even laughed a little, at

myself and my lunatic, fog-fed fancies.

She did not smile back. Her eyes were dark with pity

and something near fear.

“You want to stick a little closer to the world for a

while, Caro,” she said seriously. “I feel like this is a

dangerous time for you. I don’t know why, but I do

feel that. Maybe you ought to lay off the island for a

spell.”

“Well, I will, I think,” I said. “It’s so close to

Thanksgiving now, and there’re a bunch of new kids

in, and Clay’s going to want to do that ghastly Low-

country Thanksgiving thing for them and all the others

who don’t go home, so I’m just about out of time.

Besides that, I don’t want to run into Mellors the

gamekeeper again. He could ruin a place for you in a

New York minute.”

She leered at me.

“I see the sexual aspect of the man has not escaped

you. It’s pretty powerful, isn’t it? For an old man and

a grandpa, he flat reeks of it. I gather he pointed out

the similarity of your—ah, situations, yours and his

and Lady Chatterley and company. He laughed like a

hyena when I mentioned it.”

“It was your idea, was it? I might have

176 / Anne Rivers Siddons

known he’d never think of it by himself. What, a little

pillow talk or something?”

“Or something. I did tell him about you, for what

it’s worth. He was curious about Clay, about what sort

of wife he would have, what sort of children. Don’t

worry, I didn’t tell him about Kylie. That’s for you to

do or not, as the friendship progresses.”

And she smiled at me again, a wolflike baring of her

big teeth.

“There’s no friendship to progress and there isn’t

going to be,” I said. “He’s arrogant and insufferable,

and if it weren’t for his granddaughter I swear I’d try

to get Clay to fire him. She’s crazy about the ponies,

though. She talked for almost the first time since her

mother died when she was with them. It’s the saddest

thing, Lottie.…”

“I know the story. You’re right. It’s awful. Well, I

don’t think you need to worry about him hanging

around. He’s pretty busy over in Dayclear, from what

he says. He also said he has no intention of bothering

you again, said for me to be sure to tell you that. He

was only there today because the kid ran away. But

you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. He’d

make you a good friend. You don’t have so many of

those around here that another one wouldn’t help.

Come to think of it, he’d make you a good…whatever

else, too. A tad of Lady Chatterley

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would do you a world of good, no doubt about it. And

I sure don’t mind sharing. There’s enough there to go

around.”

“I’m going home if you’re going to talk like that,” I

said, face and neck burning. The thought of those dark

hands and arms, those heavy shoulders, that black

hair…would it be coarse? Silky? How would it be?

I got up and ran water from the outdoor spigot over

my sticky hands and hot wrists, letting my hair fall

over my face so that she could not see the flush. I heard

her chuckle. To divert her, I said, “You know what he

said? He said Clay’s going to put a property, a resort

community, right smack in the marsh where the river

and creek meet, where Dayclear is. He says Clay hired

him as a consultant about subtropical plants and

landscaping for it. I think he must be really crazy. You

know that’s my land. You know I’d never let anything

like that happen on the island. And you know Clay

knows that, too. Next time you see old Babalu or

whatever you call him, you might enlighten him about

that. I certainly didn’t get very far trying.”

When she did not respond I straightened up and

looked around. She was looking at the ground, and

her face was very still. Lottie’s face is many things, but

almost never that.

“Lottie,” I said tentatively.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “You

ought to talk to Clay about that.”

178 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“Well, of course I will, but don’t you think it’s the

craziest thing you ever heard?”

“I’ve heard lots of crazy things, Caro,” Lottie said.

“Somehow that’s not the craziest.”

“But, my God…”

“Ask Clay. I don’t know. I try to know as little about

what goes on in his mind as possible. You know me.

Just a little ol’ trailer tramp, only interested in fuckin’

and drawin’. Speaking of which, I’ve got a painting

drying up on me in the studio where I just walked out

and left it when I heard you were on a private toot on

your private island. I need to get back to it and you

need to get on home.”

“Lottie…”

“Home, Caro. Not the island. Home. Okay? I’m

going to call you in an hour and see if you’re there,

and if you’re not I’m going to call the sheriff to go out

to the island and get you. Now go on. Git.”

She turned and stomped back into the studio, leaving

the litter of crab shells and paper napkins reeking in

the sun. I got up, fuming at her high-handedness. Un-

der it all there was a small, cold curl of fear, like a

worm.

It was close to five when I got home. I knew that

Estelle would be gone, but she had left the kitchen and

downstairs sitting room lights burning against the

darkness that comes early off the ocean this time of

year. I was glad. The wind had

Low Country / 179

picked up and I could hear the surf, usually flaccid and

sullen, booming hollowly on the shore beyond the

house, and the palms rattling fretfully. It is the time of

day that I like least in winter, and I went into the house

singing loudly simply because I hate to be answered

by nothing but wind and sea.

“‘Trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let fifty cents,’” I

wailed in my frail soprano.

I would light a fire in my little upstairs sitting room,

I thought, and take a supper tray up there, and find

an old movie on TV, and drift off to sleep on my quilt-

piled daybed, and when I woke it would be to the

sound of Estelle singing gospel down in the kitchen

and the smell of coffee. And then I would find out

where Clay was staying and I would call him, and he

would tell me when he was coming home, and the free

fall of the past two days would stop, and the orderly

quadrille of my life on Peacock’s Island would resume

again. I realized that I was missing Clay very much. I

missed Carter, too. Maybe I would call him tonight.

Except that I almost never caught him in, and for some

reason that depressed me. Oh, well. He would be home

for Thanksgiving, and that was less than a week away.

There was a note from Estelle on the counter. It was

sitting under the steam iron. I walked over and looked

at it.

“It have play out,” the note said, and a fat

180 / Anne Rivers Siddons

black arrow pointed to the iron. I felt a smile twitch

at my mouth, and then banished it. Clay thought Es-

telle’s notes to us were wonderfully funny, but I did

not, and I usually threw them away before he saw

them, lest he take them to the office and show them

around. More than once Hayes Howland had quoted

an Estellism at a party, and I resented it sharply. Illit-

eracy in any permutation is not amusing to me. I was

about to pick this one up and throw it away when I

noticed that another arrow directed me to turn the

paper over. I did.

“Mr. Clay be home tonite,” it said. “He coming by

privet jet. Home by midnite.”

I did smile then, both at “privet jet” and the fact that

Clay would be home by midnight. I wondered whose

private plane he might be taking. He was adamant that

no such amenity be purchased for the company, except

for a small twin-engine Cessna that was virtually a ne-

cessity for island-hopping among the company’s

properties. When he traveled he was scrupulous about

flying coach, and he insisted that everyone else on