Low Country (8 page)

marsh and barrier islands, scalloped by dunes older

than time itself and thick with unique maritime forests

of live oaks, loblolly and slash pines, palmettos,

magnolia, and cedar. It is possible, on Peacock’s and

the other barrier islands of the Lowcountry, to en-

counter, in a day’s walk or canoe trip: bald eagles, os-

preys, wood storks, an amazing variety of ducks and

herons, wading birds and shorebirds and songbirds.

My grandfather said that someone had counted sixty-

nine bird species in the great arc of the Ace. You can

also see—or rather, perhaps, see tracks of—another

eighty-three species of reptiles and amphibians, includ-

ing a fearsome array of watersnakes and the big, thick,

brutish rattlers of the

Low Country / 61

Lowcountry, and, of course, the ever-present ranks of

alligators. I have seen, during my summers there,

whitetail deer, bobcats, foxes, rabbits, otters, raccoons,

wild pigs, possums, and some fleeting things that I will

never be able to name. The ponies are an aberration;

no one is quite sure where they came from, but my

grandfather thinks they are offspring of the tough little

marsh tackies that used to dot the interior of Hilton

Head and the larger Sea Islands, themselves offspring,

perhaps, of the ponies brought by the English planters

to work the lowland fields. He believes that the first

of the Gullah settlers over in Dayclear brought the sire

and dam of this herd with them, and since no one is

sure when that was, the provenance of the ponies is

as misty and unsubstantial as the marshes themselves.

The Gullahs can only tell you that the ponies have

been there “always.”

The panther that my grandfather swore he heard in

the nights should not, by rights, have been on the is-

land at all, since no one has seen or heard of a panther

in the Ace Basin since time out of mind. I certainly

never saw one. But I believe there was one in my

grandfather’s time, for in that vast, succoring basin,

one-third light, one-third water, and only one-third

substantial earth, life in all its abundance has evolved

all but unseen for millions of years, infused twice a day

by the great salt breath of the tides, and that

62 / Anne Rivers Siddons

panther was as surely a child of the Southern moon as

the blue crabs and the dolphins and the eagles and the

men who came so late to it. I believe that. I do.

It was out into all this that we took Clay Venable,

my grandfather Aubrey and I, on a July afternoon in

1972, and none of us came back unchanged. You often

don’t, in the Lowcountry.

Alligator Alley is a straight stretch of Wappinaw Creek,

one of the secret black-water creeks and inlets that cut

the island like watersnakes. From my grandfather’s

dock you could reach it, in the Whaler, in a few

minutes. In the canoe, however, it took about a half

hour, and we passed that in near silence, broken only

by the slapping of hands on mosquito-bitten flesh.

They were mostly Clay Venable’s hands, and his flesh.

I had slathered myself with Cutter’s before I left the

house, and my grandfather, for some reason, never

seemed to be bitten. Finally, after watching Clay endure

the ordeal in silence, I relented, and reached into my

pocket and brought out the tube of repellent, and

passed it up to him. I sat in the rear of the big canoe,

and my grandfather in front. Clay was our middleman.

He took the ointment from me and turned and gave

me a level, serious look from the pale blue eyes.

“I forgot I had it,” I found myself saying

Low Country / 63

defensively, and felt myself flush red. I would be all

right, I thought, as long as I did not get the full bore

of those eyes.

Clay still did not speak, but I noticed that his head

was always in slight motion, turning this way and that,

as he looked at everything we passed. An osprey took

off from a nest on a dead bald cypress at the edge of

the creek and Clay tracked it. An anhinga dropped

from a low-lying limb of a live oak when we turned

from a broader stretch of creek into Alligator Alley and

he noted it. He marked and measured a turtle sunning

on a reed-grown bank; the flash of a whitetail far off

in a lightly forested hummock; the brilliant green ex-

plosions of cinnamon and resurrection ferns; the vast,

rippling green seas of cordgrass and the great,

primeval towers of the bald cypresses, dwarfing all

else. I had the notion that he was somehow photo-

graphing all of it, so that he would never lose it, but

could replay it at will on the screen of his mind

whenever he chose.

I learned later that this was not far from true.

Something within him, some sort of infinite receptacle,

must fix, store, catalogue, file away. It was my first

experience of his disconcerting, now-legendary intens-

ity. When he brought it into play, it precluded whimsy,

idleness, pensiveness, even the sort of comfortable,

unfocused dreaminess in which I and most other

people pass a good deal of our time. He can suspend

this thing, whatever

64 / Anne Rivers Siddons

it is, when he wants and needs to, and often does, but

I know by now that it costs him something; that the

effort is to drift on the moment, not to focus and record

it, as it is with most of us. That, of course, accounted

for the impact of those extraordinary eyes, and the

force of the smile was the sheer relief and exuberance

you felt when he freed you of it. The smile was his gift

to you. All this I saw in one great leap that afternoon,

from watching the back of Clay Venable’s head. The

knowledge did not sit comfortably on my heart.

The banks rise higher along Alligator Alley, as flat

on top as manmade dams, overgrown with reeds and

slicked with mud. Over them, far away, you can see

the tops of the upland forests, but in the near and

middle distance there is nothing but reeds and sky and

creekbanks. Stumps and broken logs punctuate the

reeds and grasses on the banks and in the edge of the

black water, and more stumps protrude from the water

at intervals. It looks for all the world as if heavy logging

had gone on along this creek. It is not a particularly

beautiful or interesting stretch of water, and the sun

beats relentlessly onto the tops of heads and shoulders,

and if you are in a canoe, your shoulder muscles have,

by now, started to sting from the paddling. In the ca-

noe, you sit very low in the dark water. The landscape

is completely bounded by the rough, looming sunblas-

ted creekbanks.

Low Country / 65

I waited.

To me, it is always like those drawings you used to

see as a child, the one where you are supposed to find

the animals in the intricately drawn mass of a forest.

At first you see nothing, and then they begin to appear:

a lion here, a leopard there, the ruffle of a bird’s wing

in a tree, the smirking face of a lamb in the tall grass.

That is how the alligators come. At first you see noth-

ing but reeds and grass and broken stumps, and then

you see, as if by magic, the great, terrible, knobbed

head of a gator, and then the whole gator, and then

another, and then another. Afterward, you can never

understand why you did not see them at once.

So the alligators of Alligator Alley came. I heard

Clay’s breath draw in slightly as the first gator ap-

peared on the bank above us, as if in a developing

photograph. After that he was silent, but his head

tracked them as they materialized, one after another.

Eventually, there were eighteen or twenty of them in

sight. I can never be sure I have counted them correctly.

I have seen them every summer now since I was

seven or eight, and they never fail to stop my breath

and chill my heart. I know all the comforting folk

wisdom about them: that they cannot bite under water,

that they seldom attack humans except in self-defense,

that they do not go after things larger than themselves.

Certainly not a

66 / Anne Rivers Siddons

boat. I know that if you sit quietly in your craft, or

stand quietly, they will disregard you, and that they

have poor peripheral vision, so that if you stay to their

sides you are presumably safe. Still they make the hair

on my nape and arms rise and something deep within

me goes into an ancient and feral crouch. They are

simply such sinister, implacable things, knobbed and

armored like dragons out of nightmares, seemingly

formed of mud and stone and obsidian and malachite,

the color of stagnant water, the color of muddy death.

And as for their reputed harmlessness, every Lowcoun-

try native has a story about the cat, the dog, the small

child snatched from the bank by those incredible scal-

loped jaws. I have seen myself, on the island, the nubs

of an occasional hand or foot said to have been taken

by a gator. And down on Hilton Head, in the big, de-

veloped resort plantations, the shelf life of poodles and

shih tzus is not long at all, not in the prized lagoon

homesites.

My grandfather taught me early to be absolutely si-

lent when we passed the alligators, and so I always

am. They are not always in precisely the same place,

but they do seem always to be in a cluster, and so it

does not take long to pass them. These today did not

move much, except to lift their huge heads lazily as we

drifted past, and once or twice I heard the dry swish

as a thick tail stirred in the reeds. They are usually on

the bank

Low Country / 67

this time of day, in the summer, taking the sun now

that some of the heat has gone out of it; earlier, they

would have been in the water, only their knobbed

yellow-rimmed eyes showing, so that they seemed to

be submerged logs, or the knots of limbs and roots.

Then you cannot see their size, but when they are on

the bank, of course, you can. These were big ones,

mostly. I’d say they ran from about ten feet to thirteen

or fourteen. One or two smaller ones, adolescent chil-

dren, lay curled close to their mothers, blending into

the grayish mud. If there were very small ones they

would be out of sight near the nests. Even with their

fearsome bulk, they are misleadingly innocent when

they bask lazily like this. They look as if they could not

move except ponderously, dragging that scaled huge-

ness on short, bent legs. But they can move like light-

ning, can be down a bank and into the water in an eye

flicker. I have seen that. I usually hold my breath until

we are past them.

We almost were when one of the submerged logs

in the water began to move, to glide lazily after the

canoe. I drew in my breath and did not let it out again.

My grandfather looked back at Clay and me and shook

his head almost imperceptibly. I knew that he meant

us to be still and silent. The alligator did not lift its

head, but the eyes followed us, closing on the canoe,

and my grandfather kept up his steady, leisurely pad

68 / Anne Rivers Siddons

dling. I followed suit, but my shoulder muscles cried

out to dig in, to paddle faster, to stroke with all my

might. I did not look to the right or left, except once,

and then I could see the gator’s head almost abreast

of me in the rear of the canoe. I looked back slightly

farther. Just under the sun-dappled surface of the water

I could see its body. It seemed, in the shifting green-

blackness, to go on forever. It was like looking down

into a bright summer sea and seeing, under its glittering

surface, the long, dark, death’s shape of a submarine,

ghosting silently beside you. I shut my eyes and

paddled.

After what seemed an eternity my grandfather said,

in his normal voice, “I heard there was a big one

around this year. Shem Cutler saw him early one

morning, taking a raccoon. Said he looked like a

damned dinosaur. Shem reckoned he might be eighteen

or twenty feet. I hear they’ve been losing pigs and a

hound or two over at Dayclear, too. I wouldn’t be

surprised if it ain’t old Levi.”

“Levi?” I croaked, finally looking back. The gator

had apparently lost interest in us and turned toward

the bank. He did not come out of the water, though.

In another stroke or two we were past the convocation

of gators.

“The Gullahs tell about a giant alligator that’s always

been around these parts, bigger than any of the others

by a country mile. They

Low Country / 69

say you can hear him bellowing in the nights as far as

Edisto. Every time a piglet or a dog or a chicken goes

missing, they say that it’s Levi. Nobody much sees him

and they say you can’t catch him. Gators do live to be

right old, but if the tales are true, this old boy would