Low Country (5 page)

Kylie do it. Clay was distinctly not amused by the

skeletons, and even Carter only said, “Yuck. You’re

weird, Kylie.” But I knew. It is important to know what

the inside of things looks like. Otherwise, almost any-

thing can fool you.

Her books were there, in a military order known

only to Kylie. The old ones that I had loved:
Wind in

the Willows
(“Mother! Listen! ‘There is
nothing
—abso-

lutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply

messing about on boats.’ Oh, he knew, Ratty knew,

didn’t he?”); the
Waterbabies
; the Nancy Drew series;

the Bobbsey Twins; the Lawrenceville Stories. For some

reason they fascinated her.
Black Beauty. Silver Birch.

Midnight Moon
. And alongside them, the handbooks

and textbooks and charts and maps of the Carolina

Lowcountry marshes and islands that we got for her

from the Corps of Engineers and various coastal con-

servation and natural resources organizations.

On her desk, a small voodoo drum that Estelle’s

Gullah grandmother, who adored Kylie, had given

her; we never knew where it had come

34 / Anne Rivers Siddons

from originally, but Estelle seemed to think it was the

real thing. And the big osprey we had found newly

dead on the bank of the tidal creek that cut through

the undulating green marsh over on the island one

summer day, still perfect except for the forever myster-

ious fact of its death. Clay had taken it to a taxidermist

for her, and the great bird, wings spread, had kept

yellow-eyed watch over Kylie and her room ever since.

Of all her things, I think she loved that bird the best.

And that was all. Except for her neat, beigespread

bed and the matching armchairs, nothing else of her

showed. Her clothes were shut away in the closet; she

almost never left anything lying out. Her outgrown

toys were in a hamper in her closet. The room did not

look lonely, though. The space and order spoke of

Kylie as clearly as strewn possessions would have of

another child.

I walked over to the French doors that opened onto

her balcony and leaned against them and looked back

into the room. Something caught my eye, the edge of

something blue, almost hidden under the dust ruffle

of her bed. I leaned over and picked it up. A T-shirt,

a small one, faded, that read PEACOCK ISLAND PLANT-

ATION SUMMER RECREATION PROGRAM. You saw shirts

like it all over the island; they were issued to children

who joined the summer program, mostly the children

of guests who wanted to enjoy the island’s adult pur-

suits while their children went

Low Country / 35

about their own, supervised activities. I remembered

that Kylie liked the shirts but hated the program and

absolutely refused to join, even when her father pointed

out that it would be a real treat for the visiting little

boys and girls to meet the daughter of the owner of

the Plantation.

“Big deal,” Kylie said. “You think I want to go on a

nature walk with some kid who’s gon’ yell his head

off if we see a snake?”

We did not make her attend the program. It would

indeed have been ludicrous. Kylie was dealing calmly

with bull alligators and rattlesnakes when the offspring

of the Plantation visitors were shying at horseshoe

crabs. She deigned to wear the T-shirts, though.

“That way the kids will all think I go,” she said

reasonably to Clay, and that was that.

I held the shirt to my face and sniffed. It smelled

fresh and particular, like summer and sun and salt and

Kylie herself, not at all like dust. But it should have

smelled of dust; it must have been there, just under the

fringe of the dust ruffle, for a long time. A little over

five years; Kylie had been dead that long. I had not

been this far into her room since the day we closed it,

not long after her funeral, after Estelle, tears running

silently down her long brown face, had cleaned it for

the last time and closed the door. Sometimes I opened

her door and looked in, and I knew that Clay did, too,

but I did not think that anyone came all the

36 / Anne Rivers Siddons

way into it. I would ask Estelle. She must have simply

missed the little T-shirt the last day that she cleaned.

I looked out at the ocean then. Kylie had died in

sight of her room, in sight of our house, when her

small Sunfish with the red sail had flipped in heavy

surf after an August thunderstorm and the stout little

boom had hit her a stunning blow to the temple, and

she had gone down and not come up again, at least

not until long after. None of the children she was with

had seen it happen, or none would ever admit to seeing

it, but then they were only ten or so, as she was, and

all had been forbidden to take their boats into that

stormy water, as she had been. They had been playing

in a neighbor’s yard after a birthday party, only three

houses up the beach, and had slipped off and taken

their little Sunfishes out while the adults were having

their own lunch on the patio, behind heavy plantings.

I was off the island that day, at the dentist in Charles-

ton. I never blamed Marjorie Bell or her housekeeper;

Kylie had never disobeyed us before in regard to the

Sunfish, nor had the other children disobeyed their

parents. Island children have water safety drilled into

their heads almost before they can toddle. We will

never know what started it all, what child dared the

others, who first leaped to the dare. Kylie, in all likeli-

hood. It doesn’t matter. The children were so traumat-

ized by it that more than one of them gave

Low Country / 37

away their Sunfish, or let their parents sell them, and

one family moved away from the island.

I have always wondered if she looked up just before

the boom hit and saw the dazzle of summer light on

her window, saw the roof and trees of home.

I wondered now what she would be wearing if she

had lived, what I would be picking up from her floor.

What color it would be, what size. What its smell

would be, the smell of Kylie Venable at nearly sixteen.

I used to have the fancy that I wore Kylie inside me,

just under my skin, that I was a suit that fit exactly the

being who was my child, and that she was the structure

that filled out the skin that was me. Since that day there

has been a terrible, frail lightness, a cold hollowness,

a sort of whistling chill inside me where Kylie used to

be. It makes me feel terribly vulnerable, as if a high

wind could simply whirl me away. As if there is not

enough substance inside me to anchor me to earth.

Usually the pain of her loss is dulled enough now so

that it is more a profound heaviness, a leaden darkness,

a wearable miasma that is as much a part of me as the

joy of her used to be. But sometimes that first agony

comes spiking back, as it did now. I sank to the floor,

the T-shirt still pressed to my face, feeling the killing

fire flare and spring and rage, feeling the great shriek,

the scream of outrage and anguish, start in my

38 / Anne Rivers Siddons

throat, feeling the scalding tears gather and press at

my eyes. I opened my mouth to let it out, but nothing

happened, nothing came. It never did. I screamed si-

lently into her T-shirt, my face contorted, my throat

corded and choked with the need for her, but no sound

would come. I could not cry for my child. I never had,

not even when they came to tell me, not even when I

watched her go down into the earth of the Lowcountry,

riding in a fine carriage of mahogany and bronze.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard Clay’s voice.

“Caro, don’t. You promised you wouldn’t. Come

on with me now, and take a shower and get dressed,

and we’ll have some coffee on the veranda before we

go. I’ll take you by the guest house; we’ll put the

flowers around together. They’re beautiful, by the way.

Those old roses, they really have lasted, haven’t they?”

I did not move to get up, and after a moment I felt

his hands under my elbows, and he lifted me up.

“You need to work, baby,” he said. “That’s the thing

that will help; that’s what’s helped me most. Real

work. This is your job now, helping with the new

families, you need to come and do your job.”

I looked at him then.

“She was my job,” I said.

But I did not say it aloud.

2

W
hen I was sixteen, the son of the local
undertaker

in the little town where we lived asked me out on a

date, and my stepfather promptly called the chief of

police, who was in Rotary with him, and had the chief

dispatch a deputy to follow us everywhere we went.

My friend Lottie Funderburke, who is a painter and

lives on the island (but
not
, she is quick to point out,

in the Plantation) thinks this is the funniest thing she

has ever heard. She may be right. It was not, however,

very funny then, at least not to me. The deputy was a

gangling, slouching eighteen-year-old named Honey

Cato, low of hairline and waist and thick of shoulder

and head, and he had been whistling and making

stunningly suggestive and stupid remarks to me since

we moved to Moncks Corner, when I was twelve. I

had told my mother and stepfather about it, but my

stepfather said only, “If you

40 / Anne Rivers Siddons

didn’t run around with your behind hanging out of

those shorts, he wouldn’t do it. A lady doesn’t get

herself whistled at on the street.”

I didn’t mention Honey to him again. In the first

place, I didn’t intend to give up my short shorts. Every

other teenager in Moncks Corner rolled her shorts as

high as they would go, and I had a horror, then, of

being different. In the second place, my stepfather

never would have understood about Honey Cato or

boys—I purposely do not use the word “men”—like

him. Honey would have whistled and made his crude

remarks to Helen Keller, or a nun. It was his duty as

a South Carolina good ol’ boy. My stepfather was from

Ohio. The difference was measured in far more than

miles.

“So what exactly did your stepfather have against

undertakers?” Lottie said when I first told her. “I would

think an undertaker made more money than a lot of

people in Monkey House, or wherever it was you lived.

And you could say it’s a profession. Of sorts.”

“Well, you know. An undertaker,” I said vaguely.

“And then there was always this rumor that Sonny’s

father ran some kind of illegal operation out of the fu-

neral home. Running liquor or something; I never did

know what. Whatever it was, my stepfather didn’t

think it suited the daughter of the town lawyer. Even

if he did get his law degree mail order.”

Low Country / 41

“Where was your mother on this?” Lottie said.

“Well, she usually sided with him. She’d worked too

hard to land him, see; she wasn’t going to screw that

up by sticking up for me. And I guess I was pretty hard

to handle at that age. Mainly, she didn’t think dating

the undertaker’s son suited a future Miss South Caro-

lina.”

“Oh, Christ, that’s right, somebody said you’d been

in the Miss South Carolina contest. I thought at the

time they had to be lying. Not that you aren’t right

presentable, when you’re all cleaned up, but you don’t

have a dimple to your name, and you’d look like a

first-class ‘ho’ with blond hair. I wouldn’t have thought

you’d had a chance.”

“I didn’t. Especially after I dropped my baton.”

“Don’t tell me. You twirled a flaming baton to ‘Age

of Aquarius.’”

“Yep. Only it was ‘Yellow Submarine.’ I dropped

the sucker before the first five bars were over.”

“God, Caro, couldn’t you have sung the National

Anthem or something?”

“Well, I did a tap dance while I was twirling. I never

could sing. It didn’t matter what you did, if your boobs

stuck out and you could walk in high heels. I had pretty

good boobs then.”

“That’s the most un-Lowcountry thing I ever heard,”

Lottie howled happily.

42 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I keep telling you, I’m not from the Lowcountry,”

I said. “I’m a million miles removed from the Lowcoun-

try. I’m no more a Lowcountry native than you are.

Everybody just thinks I am because Clay has made a

religion of it. It’s almost as strange to me right now as

it was the first time I laid eyes on it. I get invited to

parties South of Broad about as often as you do. It’s

Clay who goes to those.”

Lottie is originally from West Virginia and is what

Clay calls good old country stock. What he means is

white trash. Hillbilly. She is nearly six feet tall, walks

like she is plowing a mule, has shoulders as wide as a

linebacker’s and dishwater-blond hair chopped impa-