Low Country (42 page)

“Dear God, surely you don’t think that Clay…”

“Of course not. But I think that somebody acting in

his name, if not with his knowledge or permission,

stuck those needles in those apples. We’ll probably

never find out who, but I don’t really care. I can’t af-

ford to take chances with her. You can see that, can’t

you?”

“But…we…you were winning! I’ve already told you

I’m not going to turn over this land; there’s no more

fight to fight.…”

He looked at me in disbelief.

“Winning what? The right to eat apples with botu-

lism toxin in them? If that’s a victory, I can’t afford it,

Caro.”

I could not argue with that. Desolation settled over

me. The night turned vast and cold. There were stars,

the same ones I had seen over Kylie’s ocean four nights

before, but I could not

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see their light now. It did not seem to reach the earth.

“I’ll miss both of you,” I said as matter-of-factly as I

could. My voice shook.

He took a great breath as if to speak in return, but

then did not. Presently he said, “You could come by

and see us sometime on your way to Charleston. It’s

not far off the highway. Lita would love that. I’ll be

around; I’m not going to look for anything for a while,

till I know she’s going to be all right. Maybe when we

know about the colt. After that I’ll find something and

get her into preschool. Ezra knows a woman with a

good little one near the trailer park.”

“Well, of course,” I said, thinking of it: this great,

exuberant force of a man, with his wild darkness and

his big shoulders, pent up in a double-wide in a trailer

park. The living flame that was Lita battering at those

enclosing walls…

I knew that I would not visit him on Edisto.

“So when will you go?”

“In the morning, I think. Or later tomorrow. If the

colt comes along like the vet thinks he will, I’d like to

take her by to see for herself. I think Esau and Janie

will take him when he’s well enough to leave; he’ll be

used to people then, and the vet doesn’t think the herd

will take him in after he’s been away so long. They’ll

smell us on him. The Bigginses have a pen behind the

store. I

380 / Anne Rivers Siddons

can bring Lita over in the summer and she can learn

to ride him. You could come, too.…”

The plans sounded positive, full of hope, but his

voice was merely defeated.

“Luis…” I began, unsure what I would say but willing

almost to say anything that would bring life back into

that voice.

“Don’t, Caro,” he said, his head down so that I could

not see his face. “You can’t straddle two camps, and

it’s not possible for you to choose one. You’ve lost too

much already. I would not permit it if you could.”

I was silent. What were we speaking of, or rather,

not speaking of, here?

“Abuelo! Grandpapa!” a small voice shrieked, a voice

with relief and joy behind it, and we looked up to see

Lita tearing out of the cabin door toward us, her arms

outstretched, her face wreathed in smiles. He opened

his arms and took two great strides forward, and she

ran into them and was enclosed.

After that I painted. I painted for almost two straight

days and nights, faster and more intensely than I have

ever painted before, virtually scouring color onto the

paper and then, when it tore, abandoning my watercol-

ors and pulling out my old oils and the moldy canvases

I found stacked in the utility closet and slashing at them

with palette knife and stiff drypoint brushes. I put on

my grand

Low Country / 381

father’s old tapes of Beethoven and Mahler, great,

crashing, apocalyptic music, and I built up the fire,

and when I got so tired and hungry that I dropped the

knife, I opened cans of Vienna sausage and tuna fish

and ate them with soda crackers and rat cheese and

washed them down with Diet Cokes and fell asleep

on the sofa before the fire, and dreamed more paint-

ings.

It was almost like automatic writing, I thought,

watching as if from a distance the work unrolling from

my fingers onto the canvases. It was not that I was

unaware of what I did; indeed, I felt an almost preter-

natural control, an awesome kind of focus, that I have

never felt before. It was simply that I did not quite

know where my subject matter was coming from. I did

not go out into the marshes and sketch or photograph

and return to work, as was my habit. I did not leave

the living room of the house. What I painted was the

island: the marshes and the river and the creeks and

the hammocks, and the secret groves of live oaks and

the shrouding moss, but it was not an island I knew.

It seemed to be an island out of another time, seen

through other eyes. I painted stormy skies and nets

flying like clouds, and dark people in fierce colors with

their heads thrown back and their arms outstretched,

shouts and songs stretching the cords of their shining

throats. I painted fires in black woods and not quite

human creatures out of an African night a millennium

before. I painted

382 / Anne Rivers Siddons

baptisms in blood-dark rivers and burials in firelit

woods. I painted wild horses, running, running. Run-

ning free.

When I finished painting, as suddenly as I had be-

gun, morning was well along on the third day after

Luis and Lita found the horses, and I was as cool and

dry and depleted as if I had given birth. And perhaps

I had.

I took a shower and cooked myself a real breakfast

and took the paintings out onto the deck and propped

them in the white sunlight and studied them. They

were crude and hastily done and primitive past any-

thing I had never even seen in my mind, and they had

a power that almost frightened me. I could not even

imagine where they had come from. Well, that was

not entirely true; I knew or could sense that they sprang

from the bottomless well of red anger I had discovered

at the poisoning of the horses, and the fear I had felt

for Lita and the colt and the island…and for Clay. But

the images themselves…it was as if they had passed

through me from somewhere else, not had their genesis

in my mind. I poked around inside myself, prodding

carefully, to see if that all-generating rage still lived

there. I felt none at all. Just the emptiness.

As if they had been waiting until I finished my work,

Ezra and Lottie Funderburke drove up in Lottie’s little

Subaru truck. I greeted them calmly, almost peacefully.

I had not known that they

Low Country / 383

knew each other, but it did not surprise me. Two such

forces of nature on a small island: of course they would

meet. Incuriously, I looked at each to see if the nature

of the relationship was apparent, but it was not. They

could be lovers or mortal enemies during a truce. The

only thing I thought that they could not be was casual

acquaintances.

“Coffee, for God’s sake,” Lottie said, stumping up

onto the deck, and then, “Jesus, God, Caro! Are these

yours?”

“I think so. Nobody else here but us chickens,” I said.

“You want coffee, too, Ezra?”

“Please. Whhhoooee, look at that stuff! You been

hag-rode in the night, Caro?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I said, and padded inside,

barefoot, to put on the coffee.

When I came back out with the coffee tray and some

stale doughnuts, Lottie was sitting on the deck floor

with her back against the railing studying the paintings.

Ezra stood looking out at the morning dance of the

light on the creek.

“Whatever got ahold of you, you treat it good, you

hear?” Lottie said. “This stuff is dynamite. I don’t know

if you’ll do much with them around Charleston or in

the village center. Likely scare the bejesus out of the

culturines and the retired admirals. I know some odd

little galleries around that would love to hang them,

though. I’ll put some up in the studio, too. The kind

of people who’ll buy them stop by my place pretty

384 / Anne Rivers Siddons

often. You think you’ve got any more of that in you,

or did you paint it all out?”

“I just can’t tell yet,” I said. “It’s like somebody else

that I don’t know did it. I’m not going to show it or

sell it, though. Not now. Maybe when I can tell

whether or not it’s a real direction, or just a twitch…”

“More an explosion, I’d say,” Ezra said, grinning.

“You get any madder than that and you gon’ blow a

hole in that canvas.”

“I don’t feel mad now,” I said. “I know I was the

other day, but I can’t seem to find it again.”

“I don’t wonder,” he said. “It’s all in there.”

He gestured at the paintings.

“So, what about the colt?” I said. “What about

Lita…and Luis? Have you gotten the toxicology reports

yet?”

“The colt is up and running around and eating,” he

said. “I’m going to take him over to Janie and Esau’s

in the morning. He’s already let the vet slip a snaffle

on him. Lita is talking a blue streak and pestering Luis

to bring her back over here. He doesn’t feel like he can

do that right now. He’s got her in preschool half a

day. The other half he stays with her. He’s looking for

somebody over there to stay with her after school; he’s

got to get some work pretty soon. Meanwhile, morn-

ings, he’s doing some legwork for me around the

Lowcountry. The vet was right; it was botulism toxin.

I know a guy who knows a guy knows a guy who

Low Country / 385

might be able to find out where it was bought. We do

that, we know who bought it. Luis is visiting

old…contacts of mine. Be a good thing to know, that.”

“Is it…Could he be in any kind of danger?”

“Not much, I don’t think. Not till he gets closer to

home base on it, anyway. Luis knows how to take care

of himself. He’s in less danger than he would be if he

stayed on this island. I agree with him about that.”

“Have you been to the police?” I said. “Surely if illeg-

al poison was used…”

“No. Somehow I can’t imagine the authorities getting

real upset over a dead marsh tacky. The rest is specu-

lation. I think it’s island business. I think the island

ought to see about it.”

“I just can’t believe this,” I said. “Who on this island

would hurt Luis? Who would hurt that child? I know

you think somebody in Clay’s organization is behind

this, but I think you’re just plain wrong. That’s…that’s

James Bond stuff. I don’t know anybody in the com-

pany who’s even capable of thinking like that.”

“Don’t you?”

I dropped my eyes.

“No. I don’t.”

But I did. I don’t know how I knew, but I did know.

“Well, listen, Caro, I hope you can scrape some of

that mad back up, because I think you

386 / Anne Rivers Siddons

might need it,” Lottie said. “I have a message for you

from that nitwit in your husband’s office, Shiny, or

whatever her name is. She called me saying she

couldn’t raise you either at the house or over here.

Your phone’s off the hook. Said to tell you Clay was

coming in this morning; he’s probably at the office

now. I assume you’re going to want to share the little

tidbit about the horses with him, aren’t you?”

“Maybe he knows,” I said. I did not want to have to

tell Clay about the horses. I did not want, now, to have

the conversation that we should have had almost a

week ago. I just wanted to go to sleep, and then to get

up and paint some more.

“I doubt it,” Lottie said. “Old motormouth would

have blabbed it if he did. She practically told me what

color his jockstrap was before I hung up on her.”

“I’ll go over there after lunch,” I said. “I really need

to get some sleep now. I think I’ve painted through

two nights.”

Ezra looked at me.

“I think you ought to go now, Caro,” he said.

I looked back at him. Somehow I did not want to

ask him why.

They finished their coffee and left. Just before he got

into the passenger side of Lottie’s truck, Ezra turned

and looked up at me.

“The paintings are terrific, Caro,” he said.

Low Country / 387

“You really got under our black hides. I didn’t think

you had it in you.”

I didn’t, either, I said to myself, watching the truck

lurch down the rutted road under the live oaks. And

then I went to dress and go back to Peacock’s Island

and speak to my husband of things that would, I

thought, wound us forever.

The anger came back when I crossed the bridge onto

Peacock’s Island. It sprang up like a living flame when

I saw the first Mercedes station wagon leaving the

nursery, laden with mature bedding plants that would

have cost a family in Dayclear a month’s food money.

It licked higher at the sight of two groups of square,