Sweetwater Creek (26 page)

“Now tell me I was wrong about this,” she said.

He looked into the mirror for a moment, and then looked back at her almost bashfully.

“It’s a nice suit,” he said. “But I’m going to be way overdressed. It’s the country, after all.”

“They’ll all be wearing them,” she said. “For some reason, it’s just what they do on the nights before hunts. The only difference is that their tuxes will be butt-sprung or slick on the elbows, or beginning to turn a little green. After they see you every one of them is going to go out and buy a new one.”

Walter stood dutifully while a stoop-shouldered older man came to sketch patterns on the tuxedo with chalk. When he came back out of the dressing room in his field clothes, he said to the young salesman, “Will you take a check? I don’t have my cards with me.”

“It’s taken care of,” Lulu said. “It’s my Christmas present to you. It’s only fair, Walter. You’ve housed and fed me for the past six months. I’m not going to argue about this.”

All the way back to Sweetwater, in the fast-falling winter twilight, Lulu and Walter talked of the plans for the looming hunt, laughing occasionally at some absurdity of hers. In the back seat Emily was silent. The image of the tall, elegant stranger would not remove itself from her mind. For some reason it made the back of her neck creep with unease.

That night, after dinner, she and Lulu sat up late listening to a CD of Dylan Thomas reading
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
. Emily was enchanted.

“Buddy would have loved this,” she said. “I wish he’d heard it just like this, with Thomas reading it.”

“Maybe he did,” Lulu said. “It’s Grand’s. I bought it for her when her recording wore out. She’s had it for ages.”

In bed that night, Elvis’s dead weight warm against her side, Emily probed, carefully, deep inside herself.

“Where have you been?” she said. “You’re missing all the good stuff. You ought to see this house, and Daddy in a tuxedo. And me, too. I’ve got this fabulous new long green dress. You wouldn’t know me, Buddy.”

He did not answer, but into her mind words came clearly: “I already don’t.”

They were not his words. Emily did not know whose they were.

“Did they come from me?” she whispered to Elvis in the still, quiet darkness. “If they did, I don’t want them.”

He whimpered softly, and slept again.

It was a long time before she slept.

THE SWEET
,
MISTED DAYS HELD
, a great slow wheel that climbed and passed and descended, through Christmas. Everyone went to the woods the weekend before, with a boiling honor guard of joyful Boykins, and brought back tractorloads of pine and magnolia leaves, smilax and holly and ivy, silvery Spanish moss and emerald green deer moss, dried ferns and feathery gray-gold spartina from the marshes. The twins found and cut two great, dense longleaf pines and dragged them back to Sweetwater, and put one up in the foyer and one in the bunkhouse.

Emily had never had a real Christmas tree. Each year that she could remember they had put up the aluminum one her father had brought home from Kmart when Emily was small. It was severely planed and edged, as if drawn with a ruler, and threw off glittering shards of silver. When it was decorated with red, blue, and green ornaments and tangles of colored lights in the barn, it always stood in the little morning room-turned-breakfast room where they spent most of their time and stabbed the winter gloom like a tree of knives. From outside, on a dark night, it was magical, a lightship on a dark sea. There were always a few presents under it, most of them wrapped by Aunt Jenny or Cleta. They were opened with murmurs of thanks and bright, stretched grins of appreciation and almost always put away soon after. Walter tended toward the doggy for the twins—bronze statuettes of champion spaniels, new field clothes, hunting boots—and the proper for Emily—shetland cardigan sweaters, knee socks, skirts. Once he gave her a kilt with a huge gilt safety pin on it.

“I think he gets them at a school uniform store.” Buddy had smiled when she showed him the clothes, for they had been in his time. “Wear them just once, to Christmas dinner, and make him happy. He’ll never notice that he doesn’t see them again.”

In his time, Buddy gave books, wonderful books. Cleta made tea cakes and iced them with everybody’s names, and fudge and divinity. Jenny Raiford brought small things for each of them, but they were unique and personal: a tie knit with spaniels for Walter, Dale Earnhart jackets for the twins, a coveted book for Buddy, little leather journals and pretty fountain pens and stationery for Emily, that made her feel grown-up, like someone who had the sort of life you committed to journals, a life that many years later would start a smile of recognition on an unknown face.

This year, though, the house was truly transformed. Cleaned and shined and waxed down to its bare bones by Cleta and Emily and Lulu, it bloomed with the largesse of the woods and marshes and smelled, in the chill twilights, like forest and marsh and creek and river combined, a smell so evocative and piercing that Emily never entered the house without a fresh welling of something close to tears in her throat. For the first time, Sweetwater seemed a living part of the world outside it. The life of the Lowcountry marshes ran in its wide boards like the green life in vines and ferns and trees; like the dark blood of the tidal creeks, like the rich, living salt of the faroff seas.

Lulu decreed no decorations on the tree except Spanish moss and pinecones and clumps of dried deer moss, and small scarlet clusters of holly berries. From Maybud came a great box of fragile dried sand dollars, bleached moon-white and nested in cotton, that she and Emily spent an afternoon tying on the branches.

“I gathered them every summer of my life at Kiawah or Edisto Beach,” Lulu said. “They’ve always been on our tree at home, but they got overshadowed by all the other stuff. They’re perfect here.”

And they were. They shone on the great tree like stars.

Forever after, Emily would remember that Christmas as one of dreamlike hushed stillness and soft light, of the cold, fresh breath of the marshes, of the strange, sweet minor music of another century. Lulu lit candles everywhere in the evenings: kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, windows, table. Fires burned in every fireplace, the pungent, clean-sour smell of dried driftwood curling into the air. Lulu’s small CD player went everywhere they were, and on it she played thin, haunting music for a few strings, or a reed, or hushed voices with nothing at all behind them. They had puzzled and, oddly, disturbed Emily when she first heard them, but soon they were part and parcel of that Christmas out of time, and she came to breathe them in unconsciously, like air.

“Gregorian chants,” Lulu smiled. “Plainsong. Festivals of carols and lights. Christmas music in this house’s time was almost always sacred music, except for a few flighty reels and waltzes. ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ didn’t come along until much later.”

Emily did not know if her father and brothers ever truly made their peace with the music, but she thought that it somehow got under their skins. Their talk, in the evenings at dinner, was softer and slower and studded with pauses into which the music curled like smoke. Elvis did not ask to go out, but almost always remained at Emily’s side. He sat contented, seeming to listen to the music, sometimes with his golden eyes closed, dozing, swaying a little to its tempo. He slept a good bit, in those days, under the tree or beside one of the whispering fireplaces.

“He’s a throwback to the eighteenth century,” Lulu said. “Much prefers Bach to rock.”

At twilight on Christmas Eve Lulu knocked on Emily’s downstairs door. She stood on the threshold wearing a long raincoat over velvet pants and a satin shirt and holding a large plastic Wal-Mart bag. It bulged oddly.

“Get your coat and follow me,” she whispered dramatically.

Emily did.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. Hurry up. I’ve got scalloped oysters ready to go into the oven.”

Emily and Elvis followed her through the yard and into the stand of forest that fringed Sweetwater Creek. Lulu said nothing, sweeping silently ahead of them on the path with ground fog curling up around the hem of her trailing coat. She had put the hood up against the mist, and might have been, in the pearly silence, a ghost, or a spirit of this place. Emily felt the need to tiptoe, and Elvis walked sedately beside her, eyes on Lulu, for once not forging ahead on the path.

When they reached the little cliff that overlooked the dolphin slide, Lulu turned and gestured into the underbrush. She was smiling.

At the edge of the bluff stood a small, wispy cedar that Emily had not noticed before, crowded around as it was by ferns and palmettos and seedling live oaks. It was perhaps waist high, and prettily shaped, round and soft and full. Lulu brushed a little path through the golden bracken to it with her foot, and put her sack down.

“Christmas for the critters,” she said.

From the bag came clumps of peanut butter spread on bread and pinecones, strings of stale popcorn, small ears of dried golden corn, whole shriveled apples and oranges, handfuls of dried fruit and berries, small muslin bags of nuts and seeds of every sort. Emily clapped her hands in enchantment.

“I wish I’d thought of it,” she said.

They set about festooning the little tree with the plunder of the Christmas fields and marshes. While they worked, Lulu said, “Did you know that there’s an old legend that on Christmas Eve every kind of animal that was at the manger can speak aloud? Maybe this will give them something to chatter about. Meet around the water fountain.”

“I wish we could come back at midnight and see,” Emily said.

“I don’t,” Lulu smiled. “Too much like eavesdropping. Besides, we know they speak, don’t we? I mean, look at Elvis.”

He had lain down in front of the tree, stretched out with his head high, looking off into the misted distance. Guarding? Waiting?

“What do you see?” Emily thought at him.

“I see mysteries.”

All through dinner and into the small hours of Christmas morning Emily kept seeing, in her mind, a little tree on the dark bank of a creek, surrounded by a small peaceable kingdom, giving off its own misted light.

On Christmas Day a weak, repentant sun came sliding out, and the earth and marshes and hummocks steamed as if still enshrouded in mist. Emily and Lulu woke early and trudged, yawning and scrubbing their eyes with their fists, into the big house to start Christmas dinner. Even early in the morning the house breathed life and light in and out; Walter and the boys had gotten up before they had, and had lit the fires and some of the white candles, and started a pot of the fragrant Kona coffee Lulu had brought with her from Maybud. With the sweet smell of the snickering fires and the clean odor of fresh greenery, it made the house smell ambrosial, a festival place.

For the first Christmas morning Emily could remember Walter and the boys had not gone out with the dogs to the river. Instead, dressed in fresh oxford cloth shirts and with damp comb tracks still in their hair, they sat contentedly around the breakfast table, drinking coffee and riffling through the
Post and Courier
, so obviously waiting for Lulu and just perhaps Emily that it gave Emily a lump in her throat. She could not remember her father and brothers ever waiting for her.

“What took you so long?” Walter Parmenter said. “Elves have already been and gone.”

Lulu had made up batter for what she called Maybud Sally Lunn the night before, and put it in to bake while fresh coffee brewed.

“I always thought it tasted sort of like polyester, but we always had it at breakfast at Christmas, and I think it’s a very old receipt,” she said, serving puffs of the steaming bread onto their plates. “Here, put some of this ribbon cane syrup over it. It’s not bad that way.”

And the Sally Lunn was not at all bad, merely strange and bland on tongues accustomed to Cleta’s cinnamon-walloped sweet rolls or crisp, airy peach waffles. They finished the pan, leaving a substantial serving for Elvis, who sat patiently beside Emily’s chair grinning up at her, tongue lolling in expectation. He sniffed and took a bite, and then laid it delicately on the floor beside Emily’s shoe and turned ostentatiously around and lay down again.

“Dog’s spoiled rotten,” Lulu laughed. “Sally Lunn was the breakfast fare of nobler dogs than he is. I’m putting him on kibbles and water.”

Elvis’s stumpy tail thumped the floor twice, but he did not turn around or get up. The ghost of the marinated standing rib roast fingered its way out of the refrigerator. Elvis could wait.

Christmas dinner was at noon this year. Cleta had been in the day before to clean and polish, but she did not come back to cook. Lulu had told her she wouldn’t dream of taking her away from her own Christmas dinner, and that she and Emily could certainly manage a simple roast. Grumbling to herself, Cleta left early on Christmas Eve. On her way out, she stopped beside Emily, who was fastening clusters of holly and berries onto a grapevine wreath and pricking herself often, and said, “You gets some spare time tomorrow, maybe you come on over to the house in the afternoon. GW has made a little something for you, and there’s going to be plenty of turkey and dressing and sweet potato pie left over.”

“Oh, Cleta, I will if I can,” Emily said, smiling up at her. “We’re eating early, so maybe after dinner…Tell GW thanks for me, and save me a drumstick. I’ve missed seeing you at the holidays. Aunt Jenny too.”

And she found, suddenly and sharply at that moment, that she had. Missed the massive, humming warmth that was Cleta in the kitchen, missed the soft laughter and clean-cotton smell, and the swift little hugs that were Jenny Raiford.

“We be back anytime y’all asks, I ’spect,” Cleta said darkly. “I will, anyway. Look to me like Miss Jenny got her a travelin’ man for a boyfriend, and she travelin’ as far away from here as she can. They in Canada skiing or some such, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Emily said, not looking up. It had been her father who had told her that her aunt would not be with them at Christmas, not Jenny herself. Emily had not spoken to her since she left.

“She called last night after you all had gone to bed,” Walter had said. “Didn’t want to wake you. She said tell you that maybe you and she could go somewhere on your spring break. Hilton Head or somewhere. She’ll talk to you before then.”

Emily did not think that she would. Neither did she think she would go over to Cleta’s little blue-doored house on Christmas afternoon. The moat around Sweetwater had deepened in the gray holidays, and she could not, for some reason, imagine crossing it again. But a very small part of her stood on the drawbridge and peered into the mist on the other side and ached for people who would not be coming back inside.

Dinner was a mahogany and pink standing rib roast, the first Emily had ever seen, with little puffs of Yorkshire pudding that Lulu swirled up at the last moment from flour and hot fat. They melted on the tongue, and were so fervently praised by everyone that Lulu made up batch after batch. After dinner, when the dishes had been cleared into the kitchen and Elvis ceremoniously presented with his roast beef trimmings, Lulu brought out stemmed glasses of a cold white milk drink that tasted so wonderful that Emily had another. But not another after that.

“It’s got a good bit of whiskey in it,” Lulu said, smiling at Emily’s flushed face. “That and egg yolks and sugar and cinnamon and the milk. It’s called flip. It came over from England with the Lords Proprietors. No wonder their noses are all so red in those old portraits. We always had it after Christmas dinner, and I thought you might like to try it. No more for you, though, Emily. Your eyes are rolling around in your head.”

Everyone laughed. Emily would remember that day as one of laughter and firelight and exotic tastes on the tongue, and of a different Christmas music from what Lulu had played in the days before, this full of ringing brasses and bells and massed choruses, redolent with hosannas. Lulu and Walter sang along with some of it: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “Joy to the World,” “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In.”

Emily, warm in her flip fog, simply stared. Never in her life had she known her father to sing.

Lulu’s gifts to them were simple and small: a very old hunting print, yellowed and rolled up, for Walter; stainless steel divers’ watches for the boys (“Rite Aid, but they’ll be useful”); a red tartan collar with small gold bells for Elvis; a tiny crystal unicorn for Emily.