Low Country (11 page)

house, his empty coffee cup overturned beside him,

sprawled half out of one of the old green-painted

rockers. He had not been dead long; I had gone over

because he had not answered the telephone that

morning when I made the daily eight A.M. call that was

as much to hear his voice as to check on him. His heart

had been ailing slightly for so long that we no longer

really worried about him. When I found him, and

88 / Anne Rivers Siddons

touched his face, it was not entirely cooled and his

hand was still flexible.

“Don’t go,” I whispered, tears starting down my face,

but of course he had. All things considered, as Clay

pointed out later, it was the place and the way he

would have chosen, and after all, who of us could ask

for more than that?

“‘I know,’” I quoted at him, trying to smile, “‘but I

am not resigned.’” Clay was my husband and my love,

but my grandfather had been the armature of my life.

For a time after that, I felt tremulous, too tall on the

earth, vulnerable to all the winds that blew. I think I

feel so secure on the island now because it seems to

me that part of him is still there.

We married in 1974, almost two years after we met.

I think if I had not accepted Clay’s proposal my

grandfather would have seen to it with a shotgun.

There was never a time, even after the Plantation was

in full development over on the shore and Peacock’s

Island was alive with home-owners and guests, that

he did not admire Clay. He probably loved him, but

in his world men did not speak of that, and so he

never said. I know that he loved me, and Carter, and

most of all Kylie, for he said so once or twice, shyly

and gruffly, usually after a shot or two of Wild Turkey.

The only time I ever saw him in a suit was at our

wedding, in the Presbyterian church in Columbia that

my mother and stepfather attended. That he

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wore the suit surely spoke of love; that he came at all

to Columbia, a city he loathed, to attend a wedding

grandiosely funded by a man he loathed equally but

silently, spoke more of it. He never mentioned his own

son to me, the father I did not remember, and some-

how I never asked him. I know that my father died

well before I met Clay Venable, of the familial coronary

disease that later killed my grandfather, in a small town

in southern Colorado, but no one thought to tell me

much more than that. My mother would not speak of

him, either. By the time I felt that I should pursue the

other half of my biology, if only for the appearance of

things, it hardly seemed worth the effort. Shortly before

she died, my mother gave me some letters from him

to her that she had saved for many years, but I have

not yet read them. My main men, as the kids say, are

both here on this island. My grandfather’s ashes are

now a part of the ancient salt blood of the Ace; I

scattered them from the dock on a still gray morning

in early spring, when the marshes were just greening

up.

On the day that we married he deeded the entire is-

land over to Clay.

“It’s really yours,” he said to me, “but I didn’t want

you to have to worry about taxes and all that stuff.

Clay will take the kind of care of it I would, or you

would. I’ve seen the plan for the development over on

the ocean, and I got to say

90 / Anne Rivers Siddons

it looks good to me. No sense thinking we could keep

this island to ourselves much longer, and I’d rather

Clay looked after opening it up than anybody I know

of. He’s going to keep what he calls the spirit of it, and

that’s all I care about. I ain’t a fool; I put a line or two

in the agreement that says if he’s ever stupid enough

to run off with his secretary, or if he kicks the bucket

before you do, it reverts to you. But if that doesn’t suit

you, he and I will redo the agreement.”

“No, it’s perfect,” I said, weeping into his neck with

love for him and the magnificence of his wedding gift

to us. “I don’t want to change a thing.”

But I found that ultimately, I did. I found that for a

long time after he died I simply could not cross the

flimsy little bridge from Peacock’s to the island without

getting a great, cold lump in my throat, and I could

not bring myself to stay in the marsh house very long,

or go with Clay in the Whaler out into the heart of the

marshes. I could not go over to the little settlement of

Dayclear without crying silently, and the sight of the

obdurate, mud-encrusted little marsh ponies bolting

noisily over a hummock moved me to sobs. The void

my grandfather left on the island whistled in my heart,

the emptiness filled and choked me.

After a time Clay grew impatient with me.

“What good does it do for us to own it if you never

want to go over there again?” he said one

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night, as I moved silently around the kitchen getting

dinner. We had tried again with the island, taking the

two children over for an afternoon, and once again I

had stayed behind, huddled silently on the sunny dock.

“What would make it all right for you?”

And without thinking at all, without even realizing

I spoke, I said, “I want the island. I want that part of

it. I want it to be mine, in my name. I don’t know why,

but I do. It’s like…he’ll come back, then.”

He hugged me silently, and two days later he came

back from a trip into Charleston and said, “Now it
is

yours. I had it transferred to you. Come on by the of-

fice and I’ll have Linda witness your signature. You

now own fifteen thousand acres of swamp, a herd of

mangy ponies, and a town full of Gullahs.”

“Oh, no,” I said in horror. “I don’t own Dayclear! I

don’t want it; that’s awful! You can’t own a town! He

never owned Dayclear; he’s told me a thousand times

that he thought old Mr. what’s-his-name deeded those

houses over there to the Gullahs way before he left

him the island.”

“Well, there’s not a scrap of paper anywhere to that

effect that I could find,” Clay said, “but it may be true.

Trying to get clear title would be a nightmare, but then

I don’t guess you’re planning to sell it, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said, running into his

92 / Anne Rivers Siddons

arms. “Thank you, darling! I know it shouldn’t matter,

but somehow I just…needed it. And you’ve still got

by far the biggest part, the part you really wanted,

don’t you?”

“Of course. If you’re happy, I’m happy. Now, you

think you can go back over there without crying on

the dock?”

“Yes,” I said, and from that day, I could.

I went back over the next day, by myself, and it was

as if my grandfather had never left it, was simply off

somewhere in the canoe, and I could move as easily

about the house as I ever had. I drifted through it,

straightening up, sweeping, dusting, making mental

notes of everything that needed repairing and brighten-

ing, and then I went back out to the Cherokee and

drove over to Dayclear.

I had not gone to the village often without my

grandfather. He was scrupulous about according the

villagers their privacy, and I, spawn of the sixties and

seventies, had the Southern liberal’s horror of appear-

ing condescending to anyone with skin darker than my

own. But I knew most of the old men and women liv-

ing there, because I ran into them when I went with

my grandfather to the scrubby little mom-and-pop store

at the bridge or to the tiny post office. I knew which

house Scrape Jackson had lived in, and that his son,

elderly himself now, and ill with diabetes, still lived

there, with his old wife and a rotating

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assortment of small grandchildren. Toby Jackson was

usually to be found sitting out in front of the little un-

painted house in an old armchair, covered with a

paisley shawl that looked as if it might have once

graced the shoulders of a fine lady or a grand piano

on Tradd Street, weaving sweet-grass baskets and

watching his chickens forage in the dusty yard. He was

there that morning, and I stopped the car and got out

and went over to him.

“It’s Toby, isn’t it?” I said, smiling foolishly and

wishing I had my grandfather’s natural ease with the

Gullahs.

He nodded his head slowly. I noticed that his eyes

were filmed, as if with cataracts, and realized that he

probably could not see me well, if at all.

“Yes’m,” he said.

“Toby, I’m Caroline Aubrey. Mr. Gerald’s grand-

daughter. We’ve met, but you probably don’t remem-

ber. I knew your daddy, though.…”

“I remember,” Toby said.

“Well, I guess you know Granddaddy died not too

long ago.…”

I paused, and he nodded.

“…and I just wanted to let you know…let all of you

know over here, I mean, that nothing’s changed, and

nothing’s going to. This part of the island is mine,

across the bridge over here, and I’m not sure what you

all’s arrangement about the property here is, but I

didn’t want anybody to

94 / Anne Rivers Siddons

worry that anyone would, you know, bother you about

it or anything. It belongs to you all, just like it always

did. It always will.”

He did not speak but only nodded slowly. After a

while I said, “Well, that’s all I wanted to say. It’s nice

to see you again, Toby.”

I had started back to the Cherokee, cheeks burning,

when he called after me, “Miss Caroline?”

I turned. “Yes?”

“Thank you for telling us. I guess we been kind of

wondering ever since Mr. Gerald passed. Couldn’t

none of us prove we owns our houses, I don’t think,

but they’s been ours for a long time.”

My heart smote me.

“Somebody should have come right away and talked

to you. I’m so sorry.”

He smiled for the first time. He had a large gold

tooth in front, and his smile looked festive and sweet.

“We figured you git around to it sooner or later. You

his granddaughter, after all. We all thought a sight of

Mr. Gerald. We sure did.”

I sang in the Cherokee all the way back over the

bridge to Peacock’s.

After that, I was at the marsh house at least twice a

week. After school and in the summers, Kylie and

sometimes Carter came with me, though, like Clay,

Carter gravitated eastward to the ocean like an iron

filing to a magnet. It was

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Kylie who became my eventual companion on the

marshes. They sang to her as they never did to Clay

and Carter. She was especially enchanted with the

ponies. One, a cobby, dun-colored mare of astonishing

stupidity and passing equine sweetness, took to follow-

ing her around, doglike, for the lumps of sugar Kylie

kept in her pockets.

“You’ll ruin her teeth,” I used to say, and we would

laugh, because the mare’s long yellow teeth seemed

impervious to everything from sugar to dynamite. We

named her Pianissimo, for obvious reasons. I still see

her sometimes, though never again so close as when

Kylie came with me to the island.

At nine-thirty that evening I sat at a round table in the

quiet patio room of Carolina’s, listening to the conver-

sation between Clay and his new cadets and sipping

on my third glass of Merlot. Ordinarily I do not drink

at these shakedown cruises, as Hayes Howland calls

them, but tonight’s was going so badly that by the time

our appetizers came I could not bear the slogging tedi-

um and the Herculean effort of trying to draw the

young wives of the anointed into the conversation, and

when Hayes, who had joined us, ordered a bottle of

Merlot and put it down on the table between us, I

simply gave up and drank each glass he poured for

me. Clay was still toying with his first glass of wine

when we waited for

96 / Anne Rivers Siddons

dessert, and the young men were sipping matter-of-

factly and moderately, as if they did not realize they

were drinking wine at all, hanging on to Clay’s words,

but the two young women were not drinking at all,

and simply would not be either assimilated or con-

soled. After an hour of trying himself, Hayes had raised

an eyebrow at me and murmured, “
À votre sante
,” and

settled silently into the wine, and I had given up and

leaned back and joined him. Clay passed me a level

look or two, but when I lifted my shoulders in an al-

most imperceptible shrug and raised my glass to him,

he did not look again. I knew that I had broken my

end of the bargain—to engage and draw out the wo-

men while he began spinning their husbands into the

cocoon of the company—but I was bone-tired and

annoyed with them all, and wished suddenly for

nothing so much as to be safely in the marsh house

on the island and not required to speak another word