Low Country (26 page)

tioning. The air is the color and consistency of veal

stock. If we are lucky, this climactic tantrum will run

itself out a couple of weeks before Christmas, and those

holidays will be bright and crisp and mild, the stuff of

rhapsodic letters home from vacationing Canadians.

Christmas is the true time of the snowbird, the season

of the blue-fleshed but determined ocean bather, but

we had a few of them even over our soggy Thanksgiv-

ing weekend. I saw them from the living room win-

dows and was doubly grateful that Clay had canceled

the Thanksgiving oyster roast. The weather, coupled

with the painful knowledge that it was on a Peacock

Island Plantation Company beach that Jeremy Fowler

had made his final exit, put paid to any notion that a

seaside revel could be enjoyed. Instead, we had every-

body back to our house and used the oysters as on-the-

half-shell appetizers, and Estelle and her niece and I

cooked four turkeys and panfuls of corn bread and

pecan dressing and made enough gravy to float a cata

Low Country / 227

maran. By the time the last of our guests drifted home,

I was drooping and stupid from fatigue. Clay kissed

me on the top of the head, sent Carter to take Estelle

and Gwen home, and pointed me upstairs to bed.

“I owe you for these past four days,” he said. “You’ve

fed and succored my flock twice now. I’m going to

start cleaning up. Carter can help me when he gets

back. You sleep in tomorrow. Don’t get up till you

wake up.”

“You’re walking on your knees yourself,” I said, and

it was true. His narrow face was actually sunken with

fatigue and strain, and his crystal-blue eyes were dull.

I knew the trip to Puerto Rico had been terrible for

him. Jeremy’s shattered parents had come from Texas,

savagely seeking somewhere to lay the blame for their

pain, and word had come that Lila Fowler had col-

lapsed back in Philadelphia and been hospitalized at

a discreet and prodigiously expensive private institution

that specialized in treatment for substance addiction.

Lila, it turned out, had been eating Percodan like after-

dinner mints and washing them down with 150-proof

Mount Gay rum. Her parents were threatening legal

action. On top of his very real grief for Jeremy and the

specter of the company’s collapse, I wondered how

Clay could bear it all.

But he insisted.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I’d just toss and

228 / Anne Rivers Siddons

turn. Let me do this. I need to talk over some things

with Carter, anyway.”

“Does he know…about the company?” I asked.

“Yes. I told him when I went to pick him up in

Charleston. He took it better than I thought. In fact,

it seems to be a challenge for him. He had some pretty

good ideas right off the bat. He wants to stay here after

this semester is over and help out, and I think I’ll let

him. He might as well get his feet wet now as later,

and a real crisis is not the worst way to learn a busi-

ness. Everything after it will look awfully good.”

“Well…if you think so,” I mumbled, hoping that

there would be an after. “I’d like for him to go on and

finish school, but it’s nice that he wants to come home

and help you show the flag. It’ll be wonderful to have

him around.”

“Well, actually, he’s going to be in Puerto Rico,”

Clay said. “There’s a lot of mopping up to do, and I

thought he could take care of some of that for Hayes

and me. We’ve got our hands full here and in Atlanta.”

“Have they…have the Atlanta people gone back?” I

said, not wanting to talk about it but feeling that I must

ask. It was, after all, his future. His and mine.

“Yep. They weren’t very happy about us wanting to

go back to the drawing board, but they want this

project awfully bad. They’re will

Low Country / 229

ing to give us a couple of months to come up with

something else. Then we’ll see where we are.”

“Clay…” I said, going to him and laying my head

against his shoulder, “thank you for that. Thank you

for trying again. Thank you for…not making me the

heavy in this, and for not making me deal with it quite

yet. I’ll do better about it a little later, I promise. I

just…I can’t…”

“I know,” he said, sighing into my hair. “Go to bed.”

And for the next three days, I slept, off and on, as

though I had been drugged. When I finally did wake

up enough to know that I was slept out, it was the

following Sunday evening, and the rain was still falling.

So it was not until the Wednesday after that that

Sophia and Mark and I set out in the Cherokee to see

the Gullahs of Dayclear, as Sophia had said,
in situ
.

It had faired off clean and crisp, but the ground was

still waterlogged, and I knew the marshes would be a

virtual soup. I wore the oldest jeans I had, and an an-

cient waxed cotton waterproof jacket, and the over-the-

ankle L.L. Bean rubber boots that had been my winter

marsh footwear for a decade. They were so salt-

bleached and mud-caked that it was impossible to tell

what color they had been. When I picked the two

Bridgeses up at their smart little condominium in the

harbor village, Sophia wore a linen

230 / Anne Rivers Siddons

safari suit almost the precise color of her skin and a

smart felt Anzac hat. She was strung about with expens-

ive leather cases holding cameras, a tape recorder, and

a bottle of Evian. She looked, I thought, like Ava

Gardner in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
.

Her little boy looked like a miniature Michael Jack-

son.

“I’m not kidding,” I told Lottie later. “He’s so sort

of carved and delicate and perfect that he doesn’t seem

alive, and he’s paler than most white children; if it

weren’t for a slight crinkle to his hair, you’d think he

was Norwegian or something. And his eyes are this

strange ice gray. I’m sure his father is white. But the

real thing that stops you is this incredible air of…I

don’t know, fragility. Otherworldliness. He reminded

me of Colin in
The Secret Garden
. He looks like he

might have been ill most of his life. And he’s so shy it

seems like outright fear. He stood behind his mother

the entire day, almost, and he didn’t speak a word

until it was almost time to leave the island. And I saw

him smile exactly once. I’d love to know what’s going

on there. If he’s that frail, no wonder she guards him

like a lioness. I keep looking for the right word for him,

and I almost have it sometimes, but it gets away.…”

“Fey,” Lottie said.

“Fey…yes. But, Lottie, that means…”

“Doomed. Soon to die. I know.”

Low Country / 231

“Well, I didn’t get that impression; I don’t think he’s

sick. He just looks like he might have been. But yes,

that’s the word.…”

It was a long time before I could think of little Mark

Bridges in any other terms but “fey.”

He sat silently and correctly on the backseat of the

Cherokee as I drove us over the bridge to the island,

and got out at the house when his mother told him to,

but he stuck just behind her, and his eyes, as he took

in the old gray and silver live oak grove the house

stood in, and the vast sweep of the lion-colored marsh,

and the tangle of silent green that was the river forest

beyond it, were wide and white-rimmed. I did not think

he had often been in places like this. Nor, it was appar-

ent, had Sophia.

“It’s stunning,” she said. “Primeval, really, isn’t it?

We’ve been to several beaches around New England,

but there are no marshes there, and nothing as wild

as this. Look, Mark, see that big white bird? I’ll bet

they have birds like that in Africa.” Turning to me, she

said, “We plan a photo safari to Kenya when Mark is

a little older. This will be a good start for him.”

But I did not think Mark Bridges would be ready for

Kenya anytime soon. The marshes of Peacock’s Island

seemed to intimidate him thoroughly. He took hold

of the edge of his mother’s jacket and did not let go

until we had gone into the house. Then he sat on the

sofa that faced

232 / Anne Rivers Siddons

away from the glass window wall, sipping the apple

juice his mother had brought in one of her assorted

leather pouches, and did not look at the marsh.

Sophia did not prod him to be more adventurous,

or try to explain his timidity, as many other mothers

might have done, and I liked her for that. This kind of

fear, I thought, could only be healed by the boy him-

self. He would find his own talisman against it, or not.

“The place where we’re going isn’t so wild, Mark,”

I said to him. “It’s a regular little village, where people

have lived for a long, long time. There are little houses,

and a store, and a tiny little church they call a pray

house. I don’t think there are many children, but I

know of one who might be around. She’s about your

age, and she’s a little Cuban girl, from a country way

down south in the ocean below Florida. She may not

be there, though; she goes out with her grandfather a

lot. He’s a very special kind of gardener, and he works

all over the island. But the old people there know some

wonderful stories and songs. Maybe they’ll sing some

for you. And there’s a little herd of ponies somewhere

close by, and one of them has a baby. Maybe we’ll see

them.”

Mark edged a little closer to his mother. Apparently

ponies were not a part of his special reality.

Low Country / 233

“We had a rather bad little scene with a horse in

Central Park,” Sophia said matter-of-factly. “I’d rather

Mark didn’t experience horses again until later.”

“Well, these are very small horses, and quite shy,” I

said. “But I doubt we’ll see them. They don’t hang

around the village much. How about chickens? Is he

okay with them? They’re all over the place in

Dayclear.”

“He’s seen them at the Central Park petting zoo,”

she said. “I think he’ll be fine with them, if nobody

talks about eating them. He gets upset when he thinks

he’s eating anything that was alive.”

“Well, I hope we don’t come across anybody

wringing a hen’s neck for the pot,” I said more crisply

than I intended. I was getting a bit weary of this pair

and their strange, self-constructed universe.

“Surely they don’t do that,” Sophia said, clearly dis-

approving.

“Sophia,” I said carefully, “this is a real Gullah settle-

ment, one of the longest-standing that I know of. They

are quite isolated. They still live much the way they

did a hundred years ago. They sing the old songs that

originally came from Africa, and do the old dances,

and tell the old stories, and raise their food and prepare

it much the same way as they always have. They are

quite poor by our standards, but they are self-sufficient

234 / Anne Rivers Siddons

and they do very well with what they have, all told.

Their lifestyle is not the sanitized one we live. They

kill chickens and they trap rabbits and they eat them.

If that’s a problem for Mark—and I can see why it

might be; that’s not a criticism—then maybe we should

do this another day when he’s in school or something.

You can let him experience it gradually and it will

probably be okay.”

She stared at me, as if to determine whether or not

I was, indeed, implying criticism, and then shook her

elegant head. Her hair today was sleeked back and tied

with a leopard-printed chiffon scarf. The hat hung

down her back from a cord.

“No. It’s an authentic ethnic culture, and I don’t

want him to be afraid of that,” she said. “We’ll talk

about it all, he and I, when we get home and make a

little parable of it. We do that a lot.”

We finished our coffee and Mark his apple juice, and

went down the steps toward the Cherokee, to set off

for Dayclear. Just as we reached the bottom one, a

great grinding roar burst into the clearing, and a

spuming cloud of fine black mud swept, tornadolike,

down the sandy drive, and we heard, over the roaring,

shouts and catcalls and huge, raucous laughter. A

hurtling shape burst out of the mud spray and I saw

what it was: a great black motorcycle with

Low Country / 235

two men astride it. They were shouting and beating

on the sides of the machine, and laughing, looking for

all the world like demented gods on a terrible
deus ex

machina
. They were singing, too; under the bellowing

motor I made out the roared words to John Lee

Hooker’s
Boogie Chillen
: “‘I was walking down Hast-

ings Street/I saw a little place called Henry’s Swing

Club/Decided I’d stop in there that night/And I got

down…’”

We stood frozen on the steps. The motorcycle swept

into the yard and past us, missing us by what seemed