Low Country (29 page)

“
Ummm hummm! Stick ’im up
!”

“And the man take Ber Rabbit, say, ‘Oh, I got you

now, Ber Rabbit!’

“‘Ohhhhhh, don’t throw me in there! I rather you

kill me!’

“So he take the rabbit and throw ’im in the briar-

wood patch. The rabbit say, ‘You fool you! This where

I born and raise!’”

Low Country / 255

“
Born and raise! Ummm hummm
!”

They both fell silent. Mrs. Upchurch’s head nodded

down on her chest. I thought she slept but could not

be sure. No one moved or spoke. I looked over at

Sophia Bridges. Her face was closed and still, and she

had pulled her body slightly backward, as if to remove

herself as far as possible from the story and the

storyteller. I looked at Mark. He was rapt, his mouth

in a perfect O.

Ezra Upchurch was looking at him, too.

“Good story, huh, Mark? You’ll have to come back

soon. She knows all the old stories there are to know.

All the old games, too. Lita knows some of them; she

can teach them to you.”

Sophia Bridges stirred and started to speak, but he

broke in over her.

“Now, before we all go, I want to sing you my

auntie’s favorite song. She always sings it for visitors

before they go, but she’s a little tired, I see. She’ll jerk

a knot in me if I don’t sing it for her, though.”

And he stood, as easily as if he were alone in the

room, shining like a basalt cliff in the gloom, and threw

back his head, and began to sing. His voice rolled and

caromed in the little room, as full and complex as deep

winter water.

“Honey in the rock, got to feed God’s

children.

256 / Anne Rivers Siddons

Honey in the rock, honey in the rock.

Honey in the rock, got to feed God’s

children,

Feed every child of God.”

Luis Cassells came in with him:

“Oh, children, one of these mornings I was

walking long.

I saw the grapes was a’hangin’ down.

Lord, I took a bunch and I suck the juice,

It’s the sweetest juice that I ever taste.”

The deep male voices climbed in the frail afternoon

light slanting through the little panes, filling the house

up to the rafters, spilling out into the clear air.

“Satan mad and I so glad.

He missed the soul that he thought he had.

Oh, the devil so mad and I so glad,

He missed the soul he thought he had.

Honey in the rock, honey in the rock

Got to feed God’s children now.”

When they had finished there was no sound but the

gentle bubbling snore from Mrs. Upchurch, and the

song seemed to spin on and on. I felt my hands and

feet tingle, and my face burn as if I were blushing. It

had been inexpli

Low Country / 257

cably, incredibly beautiful. Across from me Sophia

Bridges seemed as still and empty as someone in a

coma. Mark looked from one adult to another, as if

waiting for whatever would come next.

Mrs. Tuesday Upchurch shook herself and came

back to us. She hauled herself to her feet and tottered

over to Mark and Sophia. She put her bleached,

wrinkled old hand on the boy’s head and smiled down

at him. He did not move. She picked up Sophia’s limp

hand and peered up into her remote face.

“You remember about Ber Rabbit, girl,” she said

softly. “When you born and raised in the briarwood

patch, the briars can’t hurt you.”

Then she turned and shuffled out of the room,

through a dusty old velvet curtain hanging in a door-

way, and was gone.

“Auntie needs to sleep now,” Ezra said. “How about

I take you all on a little tour of Dayclear, let you meet

some of the other old-timers?”

“We have to go. We’ve stayed much longer than I

intended,” Sophia Bridges said abruptly. What was it

in her eyes? Not just distaste. Fear? But how could

that be?

She turned to me.

“Mark has a French lesson at four. We’ll have to

hurry if we’re going to make it.”

I stood, holding out my hand to Ezra.

“Ezra, please thank your aunt for us,” I said.

258 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“It was a wonderful lunch, and we loved the story and

the song. I hope—”

“No,” said Mark Bridges clearly.

“What?”

His mother looked at him. We all did.

“No, I don’t want to go home in the car. I want to

go home on the motorcycle,” he said. His voice was a

papery whisper, like the wings of a dead wasp.

“Mark, for heaven’s sake! I’m not about to let you

get on that thing; it scared you to death this morning,”

Sophia said. “Get your things now.”

“No. The motorcycle.”

He did not have a tantrum. He did not cry or beg.

He did not even speak again. He merely looked at his

mother with all the force of those enormous, extraor-

dinary eyes. They seemed to spill pure, liquid light out

into the room.

“It’ll easily carry three,” Ezra said quietly. “I can wrap

you both up in my sweaters and scarves. We can go

real, real slow. It hardly makes any noise at all that

way. It’ll only take a few minutes, just a little longer

than the car would.”

Mark stared, unblinking, at his mother. His face was

suddenly heartbreakingly beautiful. Why had I ever

thought it strange?

She raised her hands and shoulders and dropped

them helplessly.

“All right. Okay. But if you miss your French

Low Country / 259

lesson, you’re going to pay for it yourself, out of your

allowance,” she said.

Without moving at all, his face shone like the young

sun. Hers was cold and shuttered. Ezra Upchurch

merely smiled, his big, genial wolf’s smile, and left to

get warm wraps. Sophia would not look at me. She

did not again, that day.

Luis walked me up the road to the car, carrying the

sleeping child in his arms. He put his head into the

open window after I had shut the door.

“You going home now?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Going to have a drink with Mengele?”

“He’s out of town. Don’t call him that. I asked you

not to.”

“Good,” he said, as if he had not heard me. “You

drink too much.”

“How do you know how much I drink?”

“I know about you.”

“How? Why?”

“Research. I always know my territory.”

“You’re a tough cookie, aren’t you?” I said.

“No. If I was a tough cookie I’d be back in Miami

practicing pro bono law.”

“So why
are
you here?”

He did not answer. Suddenly, I thought I knew.

“You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re with Ezra;

you’re one of his activists, or whatever it is he calls

them. That’s why both of you are in Day

260 / Anne Rivers Siddons

clear right now. You knew all about the project before

you even came to work for Clay. I could have you fired,

Luis Cassells. You’re a mole.”

He shifted the child in his arms and looked at me

levelly.

“You going to?”

I shook my head slowly, suddenly so tired I could

hardly hold it up.

“No.”

“Why not? It’s the only loyal thing to do, Caro. You

know you’re going to go along with him in the end.…”

“I don’t know anything of the sort. I just said I’d

think about it. They’re going to redesign everything

and get back to me. There’s all kinds of time yet.…”

“There’s never time,” he said, and pulled his head

out of the window, and carried his sleeping grand-

daughter back down the sandy road toward the house

of Ezra Upchurch’s aunt.

9

E
ver since I was a small child I have had the
fancy

that, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, time

somehow stops. I knew then and know now, of course,

that each day wheels past at its appointed pace, but it

has never seemed to me that it is real time that passed.

That strange, glittering, suspended time seems swung

between two realities: it belongs to no sober workaday

chronology that I know. It is, in effect, the Washington,

D.C., of the calendar year. And so it was with this

holiday season. I walked lightly and carefully in that

bubble of timelessness and thought neither behind me

nor ahead, and was for the interval oddly happy.

I did not really forget what had happened to the

company and more particularly and terrible to Jeremy

Fowler, but I found that I could put it away for the

nonce. And there was no

262 / Anne Rivers Siddons

forgetting the heavy sword that dangled over Dayclear

and my island, but I did not have to remember it until

after the holidays were over. This gift of suspended

time was one of the sweetest and most unanticipated

that I have ever received. I was as awed and delighted

with it as a child with a wonderful, unexpected present.

And for that period I behaved, I believe, more like a

child than I have since I was one myself, or my children

were. I was sometimes shamefully silly when Carter

and Kylie were very young, but the silliness went, as

did so much else, with my daughter, down into the

sea. Now it was back. I indulged it gratefully. I would,

I promised myself, shape up and buckle down to my

real life on the second of January.

I dragged home an enormous Frasier fir tree from

the island nursery and put it up in front of the glass

windows in the big living room and spent an entire

day decorating it with the cartons of ornaments and

lights we had stored when I took to having smaller,

more understated trees and putting them in the small

library that overlooked the back garden. After Kylie I

could not seem to bear the thought of those tender,

annunciatory lights shining on that black sea. No one

had ever mentioned it, but when Clay saw the tree,

and when Carter came home from Puerto Rico and

first spied it, their faces lit in a way that told me the

loss of the big tree had been hurtful.

Low Country / 263

My heart smote me. Selfish; I had never even thought

of that.

And since we had the tree up anyway, I had an open

house and asked everybody we’d ever known in the

Charleston area, or almost, and was surprised and

gratified that almost all of them came. It was an old-

fashioned party; I had eggnog and Charleston Light

Dragoon Punch and benné seed cake and my grand-

mother’s fruitcake, and Estelle made divinity and pea-

nut candy, but there was little on my buffet that was

sophisticated or clever. Looking over my food list, I

saw that I was indeed having a children’s party, and

so I moved the time to four in the afternoon and in-

vited the children of my guests, and a great many of

them came, too.

The party was such a success that many people

suggested we make it an annual occasion.

“Of course,” I replied, and “Why not?”

Next year was so far outside my bubble of now that

it need not even be reckoned with. In the meantime,

the assorted children darting and shrieking around the

tree and through the living room and out onto the lawn

gave our house the air of a Lord & Taylor Christmas

window, and that is how I chose to regard it. We had

recordings of the traditional carols, and small presents

for the children, and there was enough laughter and

singing to fill the vast cave of the living room, for once,

to its eaves. When dusk fell and the

264 / Anne Rivers Siddons

lights of the tree swam in their underwater radiance

against the darkening sea and sky, only living children

were reflected in my wall of windows. If a small shade

joined them, I resolutely did not see.

I was truly moved to see how much Clay enjoyed

the party. I did not realize until I saw him laughing

with his guests and their children how quiet he had

become, how far into himself he had drawn. I was ac-

customed to Clay’s going away inside his own head

when there was a new project on his drawing board,

but only when he emerged into our Christmas world,

blinking and smiling, did I see that there had been a

quality of somberness, almost of mourning, in his ab-

straction. Of course there was Jeremy, and the great

peril that hung over the company, but I knew this was

more, and I knew what it was. But I did not have to

deal with it for the time being. It was enough that I

had Clay back. I was determined to keep him as long

as I could.

So we became social butterflies, something I, at least,

had never been. We went to every party we were asked

to; there was hardly a reception or open house or

cocktail or dinner party from Georgetown to Beaufort

that we did not attend. Sometimes, if the drive was

long, we stayed over, either with friends or at an inn.

We had done that so seldom in our marriage that it

was festive and somehow erotic to me to wake up be-

side my hus

Low Country / 265