Low Country (9 page)

be near about two hundred years old.
If
that was Levi,

you kids have got something to tell your grandchildren.

Figuratively speaking, of course.”

And he grinned at Clay and me. I felt the red flood

into my face again.

“Can all that be true?” Clay said with great interest.

“Naw, I don’t reckon so,” my grandfather said. “Be

something for Ripley if it was. All the same, the old

tales don’t die out. And that was one big mother of a

gator. You just don’t ever know, in the Lowcountry.”

I felt something on the back of my neck that was like

a cold little wind under the heavy sun.

“Who named him Levi?” I said.

“I’ve always heard that one of the first preachers at

the little pray house in Dayclear did, after he was

supposed to have gone off with three children in one

year. It’s short for Leviathan.”

I felt the little wind again, stronger this time.

“God, that’s marvelous,” Clay breathed. “That’s just

marvelous.”

He looked back, his face rapt and blinded. I thought

at first he was looking at me, but then I

70 / Anne Rivers Siddons

saw that he was looking past me to the big gator as it

lay submerged, just off the receding bank behind us.

My skin prickled.

“Marvelous isn’t exactly the term I would have used,”

I said.

But, “I reckon that’s just what it is, Clay,” my

grandfather said, and I felt obscurely rebuffed.

We got back to the dock just as the sun was disap-

pearing in a conflagration of rose red across the forest

on the mainland to the west. The water of the creek

was dappled red and gold, and the sweet, damp

thickness that twilight brought seemed to drop down

over us like a shawl. I have always felt that you wear

the air of the Lowcountry somehow. It is not thin like

other air.

Clay thanked my grandfather seriously and politely

for the afternoon, but he made no move to go. He did

not even look at his borrowed boat, bobbing in the

settling wake our own had made. He simply stood

there, tall in the falling darkness, his mouse-fur hair in

his eyes, the angry splotches made by the mosquitoes

glowing on his arms and legs. I knew they must itch

fiercely by now, but he made no move to scratch them.

A new squadron came in from the marshes, level and

low, and sang around our heads. I shook mine angrily.

Mosquitoes make me childish and stupid.

My grandfather swatted the back of his neck and I

looked at him in surprise. I did not think mosquitoes

bit him. He did not look at me.

Low Country / 71

“Let’s get on in the house before they take us off

clear over to Edisto,” he said. “Clay, you need to put

something on those bites, and then I think you ought

to have some supper with us and forget about going

back till the morning. We’ve got a guest room, such

as it is, and I got a mess of crabs this morning. Cleaned

’em before you came. Some beer on ice, too. You don’t

want to try to feel your way back over to Edisto in the

dark. Levi might get you if Shem doesn’t.”

I waited for Clay to demur, to say that he wouldn’t

think of putting us out, but he did not.

“I’d really like that,” he said. “There’s an awful lot I

want to ask you about the island. Both of you,” he

said, looking at me as if remembering I was there.

“Granddaddy’s the historian,” I said shortly, and

went to take a shower and anoint my own bites. I was

annoyed with Clay Venable; he had said hardly a word

to me all day. I would, I thought, have supper with

them and then excuse myself and go to bed. Let them

sit on the porch and gab the night away.…

But I pulled out a new pair of flowered bell bottoms

and a pale pink T-shirt that I knew would look dramat-

ic against my tan, and sprayed on some of the Ma

Griffe my stepfather had given me for Christmas. I

knew that my mother had told him what to get, but

still, I liked the cologne. It smelled both sweet and tart,

like sum

72 / Anne Rivers Siddons

mer itself. I twisted my heavy hair up off my neck and

pinned it on the top of my head. The day’s humidity

had turned it to wiry frizz, and if I had let it fall loose

it would have stood out like an afro. For not the first

time, I considered ironing it and then shook my head

angrily at myself and simply twisted it up and skewered

it with hairpins. I did put on some lipstick, though,

something I almost never did on the island.

“You look pretty,” my grandfather said when I came

out onto the porch. He and Clay were sitting in the

old wooden rocking chairs, their feet up on the rail,

drinking beers. Clay smiled at me.

“You really do,” he said. “Like a Spanish painting,

with your hair up. Velázquez or somebody. One of the

infantas.”

“You like art?” I said. “As well as alligators?”

“I like lots of things,” he said, “art among them. I

had four years of art appreciation at Virginia. They do

pretty well by you. Your grandfather tells me you’re a

real artist, though. I’d like to see some of your work.”

“Maybe sometime,” I said, and then, because it

sounded so ungracious, “If you still want to, I’ll show

you some of the things I’ve been doing this summer

before you go in the morning.”

We feasted on boiled blue crabs, then sat while thick,

utter darkness fell down suddenly, like a cast net, and

the stars appeared, hot and

Low Country / 73

huge and silver, and fireflies pricked the darkness. They

talked of the island, Clay and my grandfather, or rather

my grandfather did, mostly. He talked of many things,

slowly and casually, anecdotally, spinning his stories

out judiciously like a tribal bard. He talked some more

about Levi and about the skeleton of the osprey

someone had found on Hunting Island, with the skel-

eton of the great fish still caught in its claws.

“They never let go,” he said. “That fish was so big it

pulled that old osprey right under, and he still wouldn’t

let go. Drowned him.”

“God,” Clay breathed, as if he was hearing stories

of the Holy Grail, and my own eyes pricked with tears.

I could not have said why.

He talked of the pirates who had dodged in and out

of the Sea Islands, and of Captain John Peacock and

his ignominious career, and of the great rice and indigo

and Sea Island cotton plantations that flourished on

the islands from Georgetown to Daufuskie Island, and

of the plantation society and economy that had shaped

a slow, graceful, symmetrical, and totally doomed way

of life. He talked about the Gullahs and how they came

over the Middle Passage from Gold Coast West Africa

in chains to work the fertile lowland fields, specially

catalogue-ordered by the American planters, from

Senegal, Angola, Gambia, and Sierra Leone for the

agricultural skills and the strong sense of family and

commu

74 / Anne Rivers Siddons

nity that helped ensure that they would not try to run

away and leave their people. He told of the strange,

rich old songs he had heard in the pray houses of the

islands, and of the shouts that are songs, and of the

dancing of ring plays and the knitting of circular nets

and the weaving of sweet-grass baskets and the cooking

of fish, yams, and okra; of the tales of trickster rabbits,

vain crows, and sly foxes, and the darker, more terrible

things that preyed in the nights on the unwary: the

duppy and the plateye and their prowling succubus

kin. He told of the language that was unique on earth,

and sounded in the ear like music.

“Do you know any of it?” Clay asked, and my

grandfather closed his eyes and sang softly, in his rusty

tenor: “‘
A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei

tohmbe. Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; hpangga li lee
.’”

I had never heard him sing or speak Gullah before

and simply stared.

“What does it mean?” Clay Venable said.

“It means, ‘Come quickly, let us struggle; the grave

is not yet finished; his heart is not yet perfectly cool.

Sudden death has sharp ears.’”

We said nothing. The words curled out into the

night and rose and vanished.

“It’s a funeral song, probably for a warrior,” my

grandfather said. “They were maybe the most important

of the tribal songs, because the West

Low Country / 75

African people had such reverence for their dead, for

their ancestors.”

“Where did you learn that?” I said.

“My daddy used to bring me over here hunting with

him when I was little,” my grandfather said. “He had

a friend, Ol’ Scrape Jackson, who was a hunting guide

for the rich Yankee who owned this place. Scrape used

to sing that. He taught it to me and told me what it

meant. I don’t know why I’ve remembered it all these

years.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said softly.

“It is that,” my grandfather said.

“Your people didn’t always own the island, then?”

Clay asked.

“God, no.” My grandfather laughed. “Rich Yankee

industrialist who had a plantation over on Edisto

bought it off one of the old planter families down on

their luck back around 1900, for a hunting lodge. Lu-

cius Bullock, owned some steel mills, if my memory

serves. My daddy and Scrape Jackson were his guides,

and then his son’s, and when I was old enough and

my daddy died, I took over for the son. Jimmy, that

was. It was good work, seasonal, as they say, and

Jimmy paid me good to do my guidin’ and to look in

on the property once or twice a month when it wasn’t

hunting season. There’s not much about this island I

didn’t end up knowing. You could have knocked me

over with a feather when old Lucius died and left the

island to me, the whole

76 / Anne Rivers Siddons

damned shooting match. Of course, it’s not a big is-

land, and there wasn’t then and isn’t now much access

to it, but still, a whole island…Well, anyhow, Jimmy

didn’t want it and he wasn’t about to turn it over to

the government, so I guess I was as good as anybody.

It liked to have driven my wife crazy. We had a nice

little place in McClellanville and I did pretty good do-

ing some general contracting over there, and I guess

she thought I’d come on home and settle down when

he died. After I got it, she wouldn’t spend another

single night over here. This girl is the one who’s kept

me company all these summers. Weren’t for her, it

would be mighty lonesome.”

Clay said nothing, and then he laughed softly.

“What?” my grandfather said.

“It’s a fabulous story,” Clay said. “It just goes to

show you that a cat may still look at a king. It gives

me great hope.”

“Glad it does,” my grandfather said genially, and

then, “Well, I’m going on to bed. You young people

set awhile. I think there might be a few shooting stars

tonight. Not like the big August hoohaw, but they’re

something to see out over the marsh. I think there

might be a bottle of that fancy white wine Miss Caro

likes in the fridge, too.”

It was then that I knew that he had planned all along

for Clay Venable to stay over. I knew that Clay knew,

too. I did not know whether to

Low Country / 77

sit still and pretend innocence, or simply get up and

go to bed, taking my mortification along with me. I

sat still.

“If you’re embarrassed, don’t be,” Clay said finally,

out of the darkness. “If he hadn’t asked me to stay I

would have just stood there until he did. I wasn’t going

home without getting to know what makes you tick.”

Somehow that broke the back of my lingering re-

serve. We sat in the soft darkness until very late, talking

desultorily of things so ordinary that I cannot remem-

ber now what they were, finally finishing the wine, still

not going in. I had lit a couple of citronella flares, so

that we heard the hum of the mosquitoes but they did

not come in close, and in the flickering flare light I

could see the planes of his narrow face, and the flash

of his teeth as he talked. At some point in the evening,

aided no doubt by the wine, it seemed simply and

suddenly to me that I had known the geography of

that face all my life, known always the music of the

voice. When the stars began to fall we stopped talking.

The last one had sunk into darkness and gone back

to black, and we still had not spoken for some minutes,

when we heard the scream. It rose out of the far dark-

ness, high and infinitely terrible, rose and rose to a

crescendo of grief and fury and something as wild and

old and free as the earth, broke into a tremolo of des-

pair and

78 / Anne Rivers Siddons

anguish, and then sobbed away. The very air throbbed

with it long after it was gone. All the little sounds of

the night had stopped. I sat stone still, my heart ham-