Low Country (17 page)

of a minute, I was not sure she had been there at all.

I felt sweat break out in huge, cold drops on my fore-

head and at my hairline, and sat down heavily on the

bottom step. I sat there until the ponies moved away,

and then there was nothing but fog and silence and

the yellow pool of light from the porch. And still I sat

there.

Presently I got up and went up the steps, as stiffly

as if I were very old or had been badly beaten, and

into the house. I went to the closet where the cleaning

supplies were kept. From behind a cardboard grocery

carton of toilet paper I took a bottle of Wild Turkey.

There were three of them there; they had been there

since my grand

Low Country / 143

father died. I would not have thought I even re-

membered them. But my fingers did, and my blood. I

took the bottle and a glass and sat back down before

the dying fire and began to drink. I drank, not moving

from the couch, until I passed out. It was not the first

time that had happened, but it had not happened many

times, and never in this place. One of the last things I

remember thinking was, I’ve broken all my covenants

now.

The first waking moments of a bad hangover are a time

when all things are possible. Reality is canceled; it does

not yet prevail. There is only, for the first instant, a

purity of being, an utter, bodiless awareness. The body

will get its licks in almost instantly, of course: the dry,

knife-edged throat and lips, the pounding sinuses, the

first roilings of the abused and mutinous stomach.

Hard on their heels will come the sickly, slithering feet

of the great shame and fragmented memories of the

night before, sliding in like dirty water under a shut

door.

But that first moment: that is pure Zen. Nothing is

closed to you. Nothing is past and nothing is ahead;

everything is now.

When I woke on the sofa in front of the dead fire

the next morning, there was only me and the child I

had seen the night before. That was the great, ultimate

reality of my life in this moment. It remained only to

decide what to do about it.

144 / Anne Rivers Siddons

I lay without moving, eyes still closed, letting sensa-

tion seep in bit by bit under the great, white knowledge

that enclosed me: stiff, cold limbs, pounding head,

killing thirst, a great pressure on my bladder, a great

pressure waiting to crush my soul. I pushed them all

back; they could and would wait. Until I opened my

eyes, until I moved, the child from last night was the

one real thing, the one true thing, in my universe.

I remember clearly thinking: Madness is waiting for

me. I can choose it or not. If I choose the child, I

choose the madness. If I don’t, I can have my life back

like it was. I don’t have to decide until I open my eyes.

But I will have to decide then.

I lay still, eyes closed, not moving, reaching out to

her with my mind and my heart and all of my being.

I heard the morning wind start up in the live oak that

hung over the deck and the first grumpy twitter of the

anonymous little songbirds that lived there. A part of

my mind noted that it must be very early. The light

felt pearly on my lids. Everything in me called to her.

I did not move.

I heard the ponies then. They came chuffing and

trotting over the hummock from behind the house; I

could hear them clearly. Their hooves had depth and

resonance. I knew that the fog had gone. I waited.

And I heard her. I heard her small feet thud

Low Country / 145

ding after the ponies, coming closer, coming from the

east, the direction of the road. I heard her laugh. It

was a giggle: silvery, delighted, unafraid. And I heard

her voice. It was the pure, generic piping of childhood:

it could have belonged to any child.

Any child at all.

“Here, baby,” she called.

Choose, my heart said, and I chose. I opened my

eyes. I got up and ran lightly across the floor and out

onto the deck, tiptoeing, heart bursting, lips curving

in a smile that was only a remembered shape on my

mouth. If this was madness, I thought, then I embrace

it, now and forever. Oh, if this is madness, let it never

lift.…

I started down the steps and stopped. She was there,

looking up at me as she had last night, still wearing

the yellow slicker. She did not move.

She was not my child. She was no one’s child I had

ever seen. In the clear, opalescent light of early morn-

ing a stranger’s child stood there, poised for flight,

dark eyes wary but not frightened, feet and legs bare

under the too-big slicker, taking my measure as handily

as she took my heart and turned it to frozen lead. She

did not speak again. From behind the house, I heard

the ponies begin to move back toward the road.

A man came around the side of the house then. He

was not tall, but he was stocky and heavy-shouldered,

tanned almost black and with

146 / Anne Rivers Siddons

a great bush of wiry, gray-streaked black hair. He

stopped and looked at me; his eyes were hers, the

child’s.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anybody was here,” he

said. “My granddaughter was chasing the ponies and

got away from me. I hope we didn’t scare you.”

I simply looked at him. It seemed to me, in that dead

moment, that no one and nothing would ever scare

me again.

5

I
sat down abruptly on the steps and looked at
him.

My legs and arms and, when I looked down, my hands,

were trembling, a shivering so fine that it was hardly

visible, but profound for all that. I was as weak as if I

had been ill for a long time. It struck me that I had

spent a lot of time, all told, sitting on these steps. The

thought might have made me smile another time. I

could not have smiled now, with my trembling lips

and numb face. It was all I could do to focus on him.

He came closer, frowning slightly.

“We did scare you. You’re shaking all over,” he said.

His voice was rich and deep, plummy, almost a theat-

rical voice. There was a note in it that was somehow

foreign, though he spoke with no discernible accent.

There were deep grooves in the leathery brown face,

between his heavy, gray-spiked eyebrows, running from

his brown avian

148 / Anne Rivers Siddons

beak of a nose to his wide mouth, radiating from the

corners of his eyes. A well-used face. His crown of wild

hair would have brushed the collar of his blue work

shirt if it had fallen straight, but it foamed and frizzed

in the heavy fog-humidity into an exuberant afro. It

made his head look too large even for the thick torso.

I thought distractedly of a portrait of the Minotaur I

had seen in a book of Greek legends once. I thought

also of an aging hippie. The work shirt was knotted at

his waist and exposed a tangle of gray chest hair with

a medallion of some sort on a chain buried in it, and

there was a flower in the top buttonhole, a drooping

camellia. His blue jeans were bleached nearly white

and frayed at the hem, and his feet were bare. Unlike

the rest of him, they were neat and small.

He was no one I had ever seen and bore little resemb-

lance to anyone who ordinarily came to Peacock’s and

the island, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should

be afraid of him, but I was not. I was sick, depleted,

utterly numb, and vaguely angry at him. Or, at least,

I knew that I would be angry, when I could feel much

of anything. Mainly, I simply wanted him to be gone,

him and his intruding granddaughter.

“You didn’t scare me,” I said dully. “I thought for a

minute the little girl was someone else. But you should

know that you’re on private property. I own this house

and land. And I’m not

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feeling very well, so if you wouldn’t mind I really

think—”

“I wanted to see the horses,” the child said in a clear

treble voice. “There is a baby, Grandpapa.”

He did not move, but his face went bone white and

then flushed a dark red. He drew in a great breath and

let it out again on a long sigh. He turned his face to

the child, and tears welled in his black eyes, and his

face seemed almost to crumple.

“Tell me about the baby, Lita,” he said very softly.

He was still staring at her; he did not turn to me. I

thought at first he must have had some sort of an at-

tack, a stroke or something, but then I could see that

he was flooded with strong emotion of some sort, al-

most to the point of open weeping. I opened my mouth

to ask them to leave. Slowly, I shut it again. The

thought of this massive, dark man weeping on my

doorstep was somehow more than I could bear to even

contemplate. I hoped that, if I were still and silent, he

would regain his control and go away and take his

changeling with him. Then I could sit in the pale lemon

sunlight of a Lowcountry autumn and see if there was

a way to go on with this day and this life.

The child did not speak again. He turned his head

to me finally. His face was relatively composed now,

though the tears had overflowed his

150 / Anne Rivers Siddons

eyes and ran down his face into the chasms on either

side of his mouth.

“She has not spoken in a very long time,” he said.

“The doctors weren’t sure that she ever would again.

I hope you’ll forgive the sloppy tears. It’s a happy

moment for me.” His face
was
happy, incandescently

so, almost foolishly so. It was the face of a large, giddy

child, rapt and open. I had seen no faces like this on

any man I had met before. Most men learn early to

shield the force of their loves from strangers. A tongue

of sympathy and interest curled in my heart in the

midst of all the aridity, infinitely small and alien.

“She spoke this morning, too, before you came,” I

said. “I heard her. She said, ‘Here, baby.’ And last

night I heard her. I think maybe those doctors didn’t

know what they were talking about.”

He looked from me to the child. She looked solemnly

back at him. She had a strange little face, very brown

and sharply triangular, with a small pointed chin and

enormous dark eyes. Under the cap of lustrous black

curls, it looked almost medieval, the face of a

Florentine child on a triptych.

“She was not here last night,” he said to me, still

looking at her. “She was asleep in our house. I put her

to bed myself. You must have heard something else.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, smiling at the child.

Low Country / 151

“It was you last night, wasn’t it? With the horses, in

the fog?”

She smiled a tiny, formal little smile, but she did not

break her silence.

“Were you here last night, Estrellita?” her grandfather

asked her, very seriously. “Did you slip away and come

looking for the ponies?”

She looked at me, and then down at her bare dirty

feet, and then up at him.

“
Sí, Abuelo
,” she whispered.

He did not say anything for a long time, only looked

down at her. I saw that he was once again struggling

to contain the tears, and turned my face away. I was

very tired, and once more wished that they would go,

whoever they were. I wanted no part of their epi-

phanies.

He turned to me then, briskly, and took the child’s

hand. “We’ll be on our way,” he said. “We didn’t mean

to bother you. She thinks the ponies hung the moon,

but she’s never run away after them before, and she’s

certainly never spoken of them. I’ll see that she stays

closer to home from now on.”

They turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. They turned back.

“Who are you?” I said. “Who is she? Where do you

live? How did you get all the way out here? Why has

she not spoken for so long?”

He laughed aloud, a raucous, unfettered sound.

Across the copse in the thick pine woods a

152 / Anne Rivers Siddons

flock of crows answered him, making almost the same

sound. The child laughed, too.

“My name is Lou,” he said. “Lou Cassells. This is

Estrellita Esteban, my granddaughter. We’re living at

the moment over in Dayclear, up at the other end of

the island. I’m working around there, and she’s

spending the summer with me. She has not spoken

since her mama died three years ago. That was back

in Cuba, where our family comes from. Her mama

died in their house in the mountains, in childbirth.

There was no one with her but Estrellita. The new baby

was born dead, and Estrellita’s mother died after two

days. Lita was still at their side when they found her.

It was almost too late; she was badly dehydrated, and

she had not had food for days. She did not speak after

that until…now. That we know of, anyway.”