Low Country (49 page)

out to see you and talk to me some about what hap-

pens next; he’ll stay at the

444 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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.

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

Low Country / 445

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 in-

vited.

“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

446 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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 any-

thing but smile at him and hold him as he bent over

me. He looked so like the young Clay that it was al-

most laughable; the same messianic glint in his blue

eyes, the same hunger as he looked out over the dark-

ening 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 be-

fore the wind. The gold was gone. January was back,

and Luis Cassells’s funeral loomed like a great, dark

rock.

Low Country / 447

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;

448 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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 Tues-

day’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

Low Country / 449

wondered how long she could withstand the sucking

tiredness before she simply crumpled before it like tis-

sue. 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

450 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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-col-

lapsed. 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

Low Country / 451

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

452 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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 per-

petual 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

Low Country / 453