Low Country (33 page)

eous laughter, and the day slid smoothly into after-

noon, wrapped in sunlight and the sweet false spring.

Only then did I remember that it was New Year’s Eve.

We ate lunch late, and we ate for a long time. I

didn’t remember being so hungry for weeks, months.

We ate most of my sandwiches and a great deal of

Estelle’s fruitcake and divinity, and we finished off the

silky truffle pâté with cornichons and the baguette

Sophia brought.

“Where did you get this gorgeous stuff?” I said,

licking a smear of truffle off my fingers. You could

probably get pâtés in Charleston, but I knew that the

closest Peacock’s Island had to them was liverwurst.

Low Country / 293

“She ordered it from this little bistro she knows,

around the corner from her house in the Village,” Ezra

said, drawing out “beee-stro.” “She sent to Charleston

for the baguette. You could have fooled me. All this

time I thought I was eating French bread.”

Despite his disreputable clothes and shuck-and-jive

demeanor, I knew that he was no stranger to truffle

pâté and baguettes. Ezra had a town house in Wash-

ington, D.C., that I had heard was as spare and elegant

as he himself was massive and shambling. Lottie had

told me in amusement that
Architectural Digest
had

been after him for years to let them do a spread on it,

but he always told them that the hens were laying good

and he didn’t want to disturb them, or other of the

down-home nonsense that so charmed the national

media.

“I happen to know that you have a charge account

at Zabar’s,” Sophia retorted. She was lying with her

back against the railing of my porch, as indolent in the

slanting sun as a jungle cat. After our explosion of

mutual laughter, things between us had been comfort-

able, if not intimate. I enjoyed the comfort, knowing

that intimacy with me or many other people was

probably beyond this beautiful, tight-drawn creature.

I saw her smile fully and often only at Mark—and once

or twice at Ezra.

“Wouldn’t
that
be something,” I murmured

294 / Anne Rivers Siddons

to Luis, when they had gone to the Harley to stow the

plastic pitcher and the disposable champagne glasses

they had had, Ezra told us, to go to the Edisto Wal-

Mart for.

“A veritable mating of titans.” He grinned. “But I

wouldn’t count on it. I’d just as soon woo a totem pole

as Miz Sophia Bridges, and Ezra has at least six women

in every port. I don’t know how he’s standing his en-

forced celibacy down here.”

“Maybe he isn’t,” I said.

“Yeah, I think he is. He doesn’t cross the bridge to

Peacock’s that I know of, and he’s around Dayclear

practically all the time.”

“What does he do?”

“Hangs out, mostly. Talks to the old folks. Visits.

Listens to the tales. Tells some of them around the

stove. He’s preached once or twice. You forget he’s a

preacher sometimes, but you should hear him in the

pray house. It’s something to make your hair stand

up. And he’s with Sophia and Mark a lot. He’s show-

ing them all sorts of stuff, and she’s writing it down

in the goddamned little book of hers, or poking that

recorder in his face. And Mark is just drinking it in.

That kid has bloomed like kudzu. I don’t think he had

any idea he was black. Now I think he wishes he was

as black as Ezra.”

“That’s a switch for her,” I said. “I think all their

friends in New York were white as a field of

Low Country / 295

lilies. I’m surprised she allows the exposure.”

“Yeah, I am, too. There’s something going on there,

but I don’t know what it is. Sometimes she gets the

oddest look on her face, and sometimes she just…turns

her head. Or walks away. But she’s always back the

next day. If I didn’t know her for the little Mengele-ite

she is, I’d think her interest was more than anthropo-

logical. But leopards like that don’t usually change

their spots.”

The sun slanted lower, and was so beneficent on

our faces and arms that no one moved off the deck for

another hour or so. The children, worn out, napped

on the living room sofas. We four talked, but it was

not the sort of talk that demands or receives intense

attention. It was as drifting and desultory as the talk

between the oldest of friends, only we weren’t that. I

put it down to the cockeyed magic of this strange,

displaced spring day that had fallen into our midwinter.

Presently, into a lull, I said, “Why do you come back

here, Ezra?”

He did not answer for so long that I thought perhaps

I had offended him, and looked over at him. But his

big face was calm, and his eyes were fastened off on

the creek, where the glitter was turning from hot white

to gold.

“I think…to remember who I am,” he said. “And to

remember who they are. I don’t think we’re going to

have all this”—and his big arm

296 / Anne Rivers Siddons

made a sweeping motion that took in everything my

eyes could see and all that they couldn’t—“very much

longer.”

I said nothing. Neither did Sophia Bridges. We

carefully did not look at each other. I felt a bolt of

complicity leap from my mind to hers, though. Shame

and unease followed it. No fair. My bubble time was

not up yet.

“Nothing seems to have changed in Dayclear in a

hundred years,” Luis said sleepily. “It’s like Brigadoon.”

“I wish it were,” Ezra said. “The fact is, a lot has

changed just since I was here last, and lots more since

I left to go to college. The old ways are going. The old

stories are being forgotten, and the old dances, and

the old ways of making things…baskets, circle nets.

None of the young folks come back often enough to

learn the shouts or hear the histories and mythologies

of their own families. In another generation, nobody

is going to understand the language, much less speak

it, and no kids are going to play ‘Shoo, turkey, shoo,’

or sing ‘Sally ’round the sunshine.’ Nobody’s scared

of the hags and the plateyes anymore. We’ll even have

lost our ghosts, and that’s when you know you’re a

poor, sorry-assed people.”

I felt rather than saw Luis Cassells’s eyes on me. I

would not look up.

“And you’re here to try to preserve the old

Low Country / 297

ways? To see that they go on?” I said. I realized that

I sounded like an elementary school teacher talking to

her class, but I wanted to get off the ghost business

quickly.

“Oh, no,” he said, and laughed richly. “I leave all

those fine endeavors to Miz Bridges here. She a cultural

anthropologist atter all.” He gave it the rural black

pronunciation. Sophia’s mouth tightened.

“No, I’m just here to…bear witness, I guess. Oh, I

do what I can. When I preach I talk about the real

world, of course, because they live in it, after all, but

I always end with one of the old songs, and I use the

rhythms of the old shouts. For one thing, I love them.

They come right up out of my gut. For another, no

preacher is going to survive in these little communities

who doesn’t tap into those deepest feelings.

“It’s not that all the old ways are gone,” he went on.

“I could take you all right now and walk you not three

miles from here and show you a graveyard that’s

completely surrounded with woods, just buried in

them. Some of the graves are new, too. They’re hidden

in the woods so the poor spirits of the dead can’t get

out and get lost and roam away. And you’d be apt to

find an alarm clock on lots of those graves, an old rusty

drugstore windup job, with its hands stopped at the

moment of the deceased’s death. And pictures, photos,

in fancy frames. Family shots,

298 / Anne Rivers Siddons

mainly, but always what the dead loved most. I know

of one fine picture of a mule in that graveyard.

“All the old Dayclear names are there. Some of mine

are. My mama and grandmama are there. So is my

uncle, Auntie Tuesday’s husband. Peters. Miller. Cato.

Bullock.” He paused a moment and looked intently at

Sophia, who was digging for the tape recorder, to catch

the scholarly words.

“Mackey,” he said.

She put the recorder down and turned her head

away. But before she did, I thought I caught the glisten

of tears in her dark eyes, and then wondered if I had,

after all. It did not seem possible.

The silence that followed was no longer comfortable.

He seemed to realize that he had broken a spell.

“And I painted my front door blue, in D.C.,” he said

in a bantering tone. “Everybody admires it as a creative

touch. They don’t believe me when I tell ’em it wards

off evil spirits. But I haven’t had a plateye since I

moved in.”

We laughed, but we could not get the sleek skin of

the moment back. I looked around restlessly. The heat

was going out of the afternoon, and the sun was nearly

level with the tops of the trees far across the marsh,

on the verge of the inland waterway. The sky was

turning gold.

Low Country / 299

The old anxiety came stealing back, rising in my throat,

marching up my vertebrae one by one, like stair steps.

“I need to get back,” I said. “This has been…wonder-

ful. I can’t tell you. But I’ve got…stuff I need to do.”

“Me, too,” Sophia said briskly. “Mark and I have

been invited to a little New Year’s Eve party with some

of his kindergarten friends’ parents. Let me go get those

children on the road.”

“Can I persuade either of you to stay and listen to

me preach at the New Year’s Eve watch service to-

night?” Ezra said. “I can promise you more shouting

and singing than you ever heard. I am amazing when

I get going. You could get a whole chapter out of this

thing, Sophie Lou.”

“I really can’t. Thanks, though,” she said crisply. She

got up and went into the living room to wake the

children. In the darkening gold of sunset, she looked

suddenly very small and thin. What was it he had said,

to drive her away from us like this?

He looked after her, and then at Luis.

“Losin’ my fabled touch,” he said, and grinned, but

there was no warmth in it.

He settled Sophia and Mark on the Harley and eased

off down the driveway, slowly now, to take them back

to Dayclear, where Sophia’s car was. Luis and I sat on

the steps, watching the night come in from the west.

It was not coming

300 / Anne Rivers Siddons

fast, but it made me want to leap to my feet, to run for

my car, to be away and gone. Lita slept on in Luis’s

arms. He looked down at her, and then at me.

“I left the truck a half-mile or so down the road

where we saw the ponies,” he said. “If you need to go,

maybe you could drop us off there. I think I’ve lost the

princess for the night.”

“I will in a minute,” I said. I sat, listening to the night

wind that was ruffling the water far out, to the sleepy

twitters of the birds as they settled down off in the

hummocks. To the soughing of the great oaks over our

heads. To the tiny scratchings and rustlings that meant

the small night creatures were waking up, to hunt or

be hunted. There was nothing untoward, nothing I

had not heard a thousand times before out here. And

still I listened.…

“Let her go, Caro,” Luis said softly. “Just…let her

go.”

I turned my face to him, feeling the color drain out

of it.

“You mean…just forget her? Just…throw her out?”

He shook his head.

“Of course not. You won’t forget her. How could

you? I mean…stop calling her back with your need

and your hunger and your pain. It’s too big a burden

for one little ghost to carry. Send her off with your love

and pride and all the things

Low Country / 301

you laughed at and all the tears you cried together.

You won’t lose her. It’s like the old saying, ‘Hold a

bird lightly in the palm of your hand and it will always

come back to you.’ And maybe then there’ll be some

room inside you for…other things. Other people.”

I started to protest that there were other people in

my heart, many of them, but then did not. There was

a great grief rising in me, like a storm.

“How will I live without her?” I whispered.

“I’ll tell you. It’s a game I know. It works for me.

Just close your eyes and think of what you’d be willing

to die for, and then—live for it. It’s very simple, really.”

I just looked at him.

“The only rule of this game is that whatever you

choose has to be alive,” he said very gently.

I dropped my eyes. The heaviness of tears was near

to overflowing.

“Go on,” he said. “Try it. Close your eyes. Say to

yourself, ‘What would I die for?’ and grab the very

first thing that comes into your mind. No thinking

about it. The very first thing.”