Sweetwater Creek (28 page)

“You don’t,” Emily pouted.

“I did.”

On the threshold of the kitchen, Elvis sat tranquilly in his new plaid collar, eyes following every move.

“He’s got his own list,” Lulu said.

“When the table is laid and the hot dishes ready in their chafing dishes, you check the table once more for serving pieces and napkins and sauces and gravy boats and condiments, and then thank the kitchen staff and go to the library door and say, ‘I believe we’re ready for dinner, Daddy, if you’ll tell everybody.’ And he will, and they’ll start in to the dining room, and you’re on your way. After that it’s just a matter of working the room, saying hello and refilling plates, if anyone wants them, and passing the dessert tray. I think it’s profiteroles tonight. I remember you liked the ones we had at Grand’s so I asked for them. Then you say, ‘There’s coffee and brandy on the sideboard, and the bar is still open. Please enjoy yourselves and I hope to see you in the morning before the hunt,’ and you can cut out for bed. The kitchen staff does the rest.”

“Jesus,” Emily said profanely. “It’s worse than the SATs. What about Elvis?”

“I think we can trust Elvis to pose quietly wherever he can best be seen,” Lulu laughed. “He knows which side his bread is buttered on.”

A faint, “Here they come” floated back from the far edge of the driveway, where the twins were stationed as outriders. They had flatly refused to wear tuxedos and mingle with the storied planters, so they had been allowed to dress in their good shetland sweaters and wool slacks, which they wore perhaps once every two years, and serve as scouts.

Inside, in the foyer, Walter and the two girls heard the hail. Walter smoothed the tuxedo coat and took a deep breath, looking white-eyed over at Lulu. Emily tried to breathe through lungs turned suddenly to cement. Lulu smiled at both of them.

“Here we go,” she said, and opened the front door, and they went out into the clear cold dark of New Year’s Eve to welcome the planters of three counties to Sweetwater.

AT SEVEN
-
THIRTY
that evening Emily, bearing plates of crabmeat canapés and hot cheese puffs, paused in the doorway to the library and listened to the voice of the house.

It was not a voice she had heard before. Before tonight, the house had said nothing to her. Now, it spoke so closely and clearly into her ears that it might have been a great, living entity. For the first time, Emily saw that it was. She knew that the way she thought of Sweetwater had changed forever.

Its voice was almost entirely masculine, and very old. It was woven of the lazy, indistinct talk of men, punctuated by eruptions of raucous laughter; the creaking of wide, waxed old boards under men’s feet; the tinkle of ice against crystal and the tink of silver against silver; the whispered roar of fires; and, as if from a great distance, the excited yips of dogs. It seemed to Emily that the voice had been speaking to her all along, speaking for centuries, even, and she was only just now hearing it. This, she knew without knowing how, was how the house was supposed to sound, and it opened and bloomed under its freedom to speak.

“I wonder if anybody else hears it,” she thought. “If they do, they don’t let on. I bet Buddy did, though. And Elvis.”

She looked down at him, sitting at her left heel.

“Do you hear it?”

“Of course.”

Emily smelled the breath of the house, too: rich tobacco, burning applewood, faint exhalations from damp old rugs and wet wool, the somehow old bronze smell of whiskey. And always, a constant undernote, clean and sweet to Emily, the smell of burnished spaniels.

Her mouth relaxed from the stiff social rictus bidden by Lulu into something softer, of a piece with the voice and breath of the old house: the smile of a daughter of the house. Going into the room with her plates, Emily was, for the first time that night, able to perform her role with ease.

“Please try the cheese puffs,” she said to one big, tuxedoed man after another. “They’re a specialty of Cleta’s. And we caught the crabs from off our dock. Lulu and I made these this afternoon.”

And one by one the men took the appetizers and bit into them and nodded their heads appreciatively, and smiled at Emily the same easy smiles they bent upon Lulu.

“You the little girl who trained Rhett Foxworth’s Boykins? He said he’d never seen anything like you. He didn’t say you were so grown-up and pretty, though. Walter, where you been hiding this girl?”

“She’s my secret weapon,” Walter Parmenter said in a burst of unaccustomed grace, and smiled at Emily. Across the room, handing a fresh drink to a large, red-faced man indistinguishable to Emily from all the others, Lulu smiled too.

“Well, Missy, your daddy tells me you’ve spent the summer and fall out here learning about spaniels,” the man said to Lulu. “Going to start your own kennel?”

“There’s nothing I’d love more, Mr. Aiken,” Lulu said.

“Well, you better get on back into town. Half the swains of Charleston are pining over your absence.”

“Swains will keep,” Lulu said. “Spaniels won’t.”

Everyone laughed.

Meeting Lulu back in the bustling kitchen, Emily let out a deep breath.

“How am I doing?”

“Good. Better than good. Didn’t I tell you? I think it’s in your genes.”

“Well, it must be way back, then,” Emily said, and then stopped. She thought of her beautiful, storied mother and her parties and dinners; she thought of Jenny Raiford’s easy grace at their dinner table. Maybe not so far back after all.

“Now, that’s the last of the chafing dishes,” Lulu said. “You go in and ask your father to start everybody in to dinner while I do a last-minute check. After that we can go sit in the breakfast room and put our feet up and have a bite. They’ll be occupied for a while.”

Emily had started for the library when the big front-door knocker thundered. She looked around at Lulu. It was very late for anyone to be arriving.

“I’ll get it,” Lulu said. “You go on into the library.”

Emily heard the big front door creak open, and a small silence, and then Lulu said, “Daddy! What on earth are you doing here? I thought you all were still on St. Bart’s. Is Mother with you?”

Emily stopped to listen.

“No,” Rhett Foxworth’s big voice said. “She ran into three of her sorority sisters from Sweetbriar a couple of days ago, celebrating one of them’s divorce, and the bridge and gossip show no signs of stopping, so I came on home. Didn’t want to miss the hunt. You look beautiful, sugar. It sounds like everybody’s having a good time.”

“I think they are,” Lulu said. “I’m glad to see you, Daddy. Come on in; there’s time for a drink before dinner.”

“Never turned one of those down,” Rhett Foxworth said. And then, “I’ve brought you a surprise. Found him in the men’s bar at the Yacht Club. Just got to town from UVA. He says it’s been a coon’s age since he’s seen you. He’s been trying to get ahold of you. I think he thinks you’re hiding from him.”

The silence rang. Emily edged out into the foyer. Rhett Foxworth, in a predictably elderly tuxedo, stood with his arm around Lulu, smiling down at her. Lulu stood as still as a statue, looking up at a young man in dinner clothes who was holding her hand lightly in his.

He was beautiful; there was no other word for it. Dark and fine-planed of face with startling blue eyes to match Lulu’s own, and a cap of close-cropped black curls. His smile looked somehow archaic, the full-lipped V Emily had seen in pictures of heroic statues from the age of Theseus and Ariadne. He looked like a beautiful pagan, like a Greek god, or an Etruscan. Emily knew instantly who he was, and a fine, cold wire squeezed her heart.

After a moment, Lulu said, in a light, sweet voice, “How nice to see you. Yancey. Welcome to Sweetwater. Come into the library and meet my friend Emily and her father. They’ve been teaching me all there is to know about Boykin spaniels. I’ll get you a drink.”

“Thanks, Lu,” Yancey Byrd said. His voice was deep and lazy, as beautiful as the rest of him. His smile was quick and white and a little lopsided; endearing. Smile lines cut his cheeks, and his dark blue eyes twinkled. Something else lurked there, too, something that, Emily thought, could flash up suddenly out of its depths like a shark out of a dark ocean. The backs of his brown hands were furred with dark hair.

“I’ve had a hard time tracking you down, Lu,” he smiled. “You’re not going to get away again. I missed the biggest cotillion in Richmond to find you.”

“Come this way,” Lulu said evenly, and turned and glided away on her father’s arm toward the library. Yancey Byrd noticed Emily frozen in the doorway and, incredibly, winked before he followed Rhett and Lulu.

Emily stood still in the doorway, sick and faint with fear.

But, after all, nothing happened. Lulu was as lightly and politely affectionate with Yancey Byrd as she was with her father’s oldest friends, teasing and flattering and fetching refills and passing dessert. Emily, beside her, looked hard and often into her face, but Lulu just smiled and shook her head: “Okay. I’m okay.”

After dinner, they sat for a while with the men by the fire, while brandy and cigars came out and laughter deepened and tales grew taller. Emily looked at her father, standing before the fire with one arm on the fabled gougework mantelpiece, holding a glass of Courvoisier and laughing. He looked unreal to her: young, handsomer by far than any man in the room but Yancey Byrd, totally at ease in his skin with these men who had intimidated him so long. Watching him, Emily felt Sweetwater’s future shift before her eyes. She looked over at Lulu, the author of the change. Lulu was sitting beside her father, on the arm of his chair, telling a ridiculous little story about the first time she tried to get a Boykin puppy to sit and stay. She was hectic, radiant, as beautiful as fire unchecked. Every eye in the room was on her, and she smiled at each of these old family friends in turn. She did not look at Yancey Byrd, lounging in the comfortable old leather morris chair beside the fire. His eyes never left her, though.

She would not look at Emily, either. Beside Emily, pressed against her leg, so beautiful in his curly red coat and jaunty tartan collar that one man after another had knelt before him as in obeisance, Elvis began to growl. Emily could not hear it, but she could feel it, steady and throbbing slowly like an inboard engine: inaudible, eerie.

Emily was exhausted with apprehension when Lulu finally rose and said, “Well, gentlemen, I think Emily and I will leave you to your own evil devices. There’s a bar out in the bunkhouse, and poker tables, if anyone is so inclined, and Peter will have Bloodies and ham and biscuits before you go out in the morning. Happy hunting. We’ll see you when you come in tomorrow.”

Lulu went out of the room, with Emily behind her. The barbed bonds around her heart eased slightly. They were leaving at last. Nothing, after all, had happened. They would get into their nightclothes and drink hot chocolate and laugh and rehash the evening. Lulu would have stories to tell about the men who had come this night that would rival any she told around the Parmenter dinner table. They would sleep late in the morning.

In the foyer she reached for her down coat, but Lulu laid a hand on her arm.

“I didn’t realize everybody was going to stay so late,” she said. “Emily, you need to sleep here tonight. As long as your father has guests in the house, you really should be here, too.”

“Lulu…” Emily began desperately, the fear uncoiling again and striking like a snake.

“It’s the way it’s done, Emily,” Lulu said. She hugged Emily briefly and hard.

“You were absolutely magnificent tonight,” she said. “Your father should be proud of you.”

She turned and went out of the foyer into the silent cold. Before the door swung shut Emily could see her, whip-slim and erect on the icy stubble of the lawn, her long shadow preceding her, limned in light from the rising wolf moon.

In her dusty old room, deep under covers she had hidden in every winter of her life, Emily lay and listened until the last of the men’s jovial voices faded from the foyer and the front door shut, firmly and finally. The house did not speak to her now.

Beside her, Elvis lay, rigid and still. Listening, too.

IN THE MORNING
, stiff and sore, Emily dressed in her old jeans and a heavy sweater and went downstairs to the kitchen.

“Have you seen Lulu?” she asked Cleta, who was clattering dishes and humming once more. The kitchen was warm and spotless and empty of marauding Maybud servants.

“She stick her head in early this morning and say she going out with the hunt,” Cleta said. “Said tell you she’ll see you this afternoon when everybody gets in. Gon’ have that birthday party before the oyster roast, she say. I hope she don’t forget. I spent two hours at home last night making that carrot cake you like. See? Got your name and thirteen candles on it. Happy birthday, Emily. It seems like a hundred years since your last one.”

“Out with the hunt…” Emily said slowly. “Lulu doesn’t hunt. She hates hunting. She said she was going to sleep in this morning…”

“Well, she sho’ ain’t sleep good, then,” Cleta said, looking sidewise at Emily. “She look like she been rode hard and put up wet. Shaky and white, with them funny blue eyes shining out—she look like she did when she come last summer.”

“What does she want on the hunt?” Emily said miserably. “We were going to watch a movie this afternoon, before my party. She rented
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She said it was time I got to know about Moon River.”

“I don’t think it’s a what she want on that hunt,” Cleta said. “I think it’s a who. That big black-headed man what came in with Mr. Foxworth last night was standin’ behind her on the porch. He was holding two shotguns, and they was both wearing them waxy coats folks hunt in. Boots, too. I’d say Miss Lulu gon’ get her a good bag, and prob’ly not of ducks.”

Emily swallowed a sob so hard that Cleta heard it and turned to her.

“She be back this evenin’,” she said, pushing back Emily’s tumbled hair. “And it ain’t like we thought she never had a boyfriend. Bound to be a fox hangin’ around the henhouse, pretty as she is. He be gone after breakfast tomorrow, and y’ll be right back giggling and hustling dogs. Lord, Emily, you as hot as a firecracker. You got a fever?”

“No,” Emily quavered, pulling away. It seemed to her that if she could just reach the safety of the little bedroom in the barn, crawl into her bed and pull Lulu’s mother’s pouffy covers over her head, she would fall asleep, and when she wakened Lulu would be there, teasing her and cutting cake and tossing tidbits to Elvis, and last night would have been a long dream, after all.

“Well, you sit down and have yourself some of this french toast, then. I made some for Elvis, too.”

“I’ll get something out at the barn,” Emily mumbled. “There are some sweet rolls. Thank you for the cake, Cleta. It’s beautiful. I’ll save some for you to take home to GW and Robert.”

She went out into pale, iron-cold sunlight. After the door closed behind her, Cleta folded her arms and stared without seeing at the cake with thirteen candles.

“Thirteen ain’t old enough for another one to leave her,” she said under her breath. “I knowed that girl got the dark in her when she first come. We needs for Miss Jenny to come on back.”

But Jenny Raiford would not come back, Cleta knew. A golden cuckoo had pushed her out of the nest and was sitting her egg. Cleta bowed her head and said a small prayer that, when the cuckoo left, the egg would not be smashed beyond repair.

Lulu did not come back with the hunt that afternoon. Emily was watching from her window in the barn when the mules came in, pulling laughing men and milling dogs and canvas bags bulging with ducks. Lulu was not with them. Neither was Yancey Byrd.

She did not appear for the oyster roast on the dock that night, either. Leaden with dread, Emily went about her duties as daughter of the house, smiling dully at the planters and asking after their day’s hunting, passing tin plates of steaming oysters fresh from the beds on the banks of Sweetwater Creek, checking to see who might need another drink.

How do I know how to do this? she thought once, dully. Lulu was right. It must be in my genes. Oh, Lulu.

Midway through the roast, Rhett Foxworth sought her out.

“Have you seen my wayward daughter and that fellow of hers?” he asked. “Don’t like her leaving you to do all the work.”

“No, sir,” Emily said, looking down at her feet in damp Wellingtons. Away from the fire the air was frigid. Her breath lay silver on it. The swollen moon seemed to hang just above the river, spilling its cold radiance down on the dock, so bright that she could see his face clearly, and on it she saw only amusement and mild annoyance.

“I thought maybe they might have gone into town or somewhere. I haven’t seen her car since last night.”

The “somewhere” was freighted with sly import. None of the men missed what Rhett Foxworth was saying. There was indulgent laughter.

“Well, maybe they’ve made it up,” a wiry dun-colored man in oils said. “My girl was a couple of years behind your girl in school. She says they were a hot item for a long time, until Miss Lulu dumped him and came home. This doesn’t seem like no dumping to me.”

“He that Byrd kid that’s coming in with Comer Tarleton after he passes his bar exams? Is he those Virginia Byrds? If he is, I was at Princeton with his dad. Rolling in family and bucks. Your girl would be smart to marry him quick.”

“You never can tell with Lulu,” her father said. “For some reason she was dead set against even seeing him again when she got home. Well, if she doesn’t marry him, I’m pretty sure Maybelle will. She fell without a shot the minute she met him.”

The talk turned to other things. Emily stood still on the dock. It seemed to rock under her. She had never been so tired in her life. She looked across at her father. He was looking out over the river, his face mild and blank. Perhaps he had not heard.

He turned to face her then, and she knew that he had. Emily had watched fish die on the dock, drowning in air. The fish did not change, but something went out of the eyes and the scales. Something like that had gone out of Walter Parmenter.

“You go on up to the house, Emily,” he said. “You look worn out. We’ll clear up this mess in the morning. Cleta’s coming. Thanks for…stepping in.”

“Yessir,” Emily mumbled. The genetic hostess seemed to drain out of her. She turned and trudged back to the house, Elvis clicking along beside her.

In the house, she wandered into the kitchen, still lit and warm, though empty now. The whole house was empty; you could feel it, like the emptiness of a cave. She looked over at the carrot cake, its icing hardened to a glossy shell. The inscription Cleta had piped onto it was beginning to soften and spread. The thirteen unlit candles looked like a cage. Emily walked over and stuck a finger into the icing and licked it off.

“Happy birthday to me,” she said aloud. “I’ve been thirteen for a whole day and I don’t know anything at all.”

She went out of the kitchen and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. There was simply no way that she could sleep in that vast barn where Lulu was not.

“Lulu, where are you?” she whispered, knowing that there would be no answer.

Passing the window that looked out on the porch and yard and the barn beyond, she saw that the little red car was back. It was faded to sickly pink by the yellow sodium security lights and the bleaching moonlight. Joy came alive like the last ember in a dead fire. Emily opened the door and began to run, Elvis beside her, tongue lolling. She knew dimly that she was cold, but did not care. Lulu’s apartment would be warm.

But when she pounded up the stairs to Lulu’s door, she found it locked. Tentatively, she rattled the doorknob. Then she knocked.

“Lulu?”

No sound answered her. She knew that the apartment was, like the big house, empty. There was an old song Aunt Jenny sometimes sang, a song out of her time. “The Sound of Silence” it was called. This was what it meant.

Emily closed her eyes and leaned against the door. She did not think she had enough strength to get back to Sweetwater.

“Lulu, where are you?” she whispered again.

And suddenly, without the smallest shaving of a doubt, she knew. She was halfway across the stubbled, moon-silvered field that ended in the little maritime forest at Sweetwater Creek before she realized quite where she was. She was so bitterly cold that she would die of it if she thought about it.

Beside her, Elvis ran steadily, silently, his head down. Tracking.

She burst into the dark tunnel of the path through the woods, her breath sobbing in her throat. In the winter it was sparser, all stinging twigs and tearing vines. You could see farther than in summer. Looking ahead, Emily saw that there was a flickering yellow light where the little woodland tree would be, on the cliff over the dolphin slide. A fire; Lulu was there waiting beside a fire. What a lovely idea; how like Lulu…

She quickened her pace toward the far end of the path. Once or twice she stumbled and went down on one knee, but she felt no pain. Nor did she feel the cold. There would be warmth ahead.

Before her, Elvis stopped so suddenly that she literally jumped over him.

“Come on,” she called, not stopping. But he did not come. Instead, he began to bark, furiously. Emily ran on.

And then she heard what he must have: a thin, guttural cry, and then another and another, closer together, higher, louder.

Lulu. Lulu in pain. She was with the corrupted pagan god and he was hurting her. All the roiling emotions that had torn Emily since that morning drained away, and it was Emily the Protector, the powerful bestower of “Everything is going to be all right,” that pounded on the path toward the clearing and the light. Her fists were clenched, and her teeth, but she did not notice. Elvis dashed past her, still barking furiously; it was a feral sound, one she had never heard a Boykin make.

“We’ll get him, Elvis,” she said in her mind.

He stopped dead in front of her, blocking the path. She could see his teeth gleam white where his lips were drawn back, and this time heard the deep, continuing growl. It rose and fell softly, the sound of danger that came down from the first cave fires to which the wild dogs had come.

“Stop!”
She heard him clearly.

And at the same time, in her ears so clearly that he might have been standing close beside her, Buddy said,
“Emily, stop!”

She did, but momentum carried her the last few steps and she lurched into the clear space on the little cliff and fell to one knee.

She did not get up. The air in front of her wavered and thickened, as if she were seeing it through mist or a heat haze, and the entire clearing seemed bathed in a radiance far, far brighter than even the wolf moon could spill out. Later, she read somewhere that in times of extreme shock and fear the pupil of the eye contracts so profoundly that for a time the world seems almost unbearably bright.

The fire whose light she had seen was flickering beside the little tree they had decorated for the animals. Inanely, Emily noticed that most of the offerings were gone; good. The creatures had been here. They would hang up more. The fire had been made in a big aluminum washtub, and was near to wavering out. She looked out into the sea of spartina that rolled toward the western horizon; it shone black and silver in the moonlight, and was cut by the glittering black tidal creeks, in each of which a tiny moon shone. Tide must be almost full in, she thought.

And then her eyes were pulled into the middle of the clearing, and her legs crumpled under her, and she sat down hard in tangles of briars on the cold earth. Elvis edged backward to stand beside her, but he did not stop growling.

In the center of the bare little cliff a black-and-gold striped blanket had been thrown down. Lulu lay on it, on her back, naked, eyes closed, legs sprawled slack and far apart, ribs heaving with breath. Her flesh looked spongy and discolored, like bruised fruit. There were red-black scratches on her breasts and stomach. The entire clearing stank so powerfully of whiskey and vomit that Emily’s stomach turned like a gaffed fish.

The man who lay on top of her was not naked, but his pants were down around his ankles, as if he had been in a hurry. He raised himself slightly from her body with his forearms, which had pinned Lulu’s arms to the ground, and Emily saw that he was still inside her. He looked slowly around at Emily in her supplicants’ pose, and smiled. His penis slipped out of Lulu then, and lay flaccidly on her stomach, long and thin and white. As Emily stared it began to stir slightly against the spoiled flesh, and stiffen.

“Care to join us?” Yancey Byrd said.

Emily could not speak and she could not move. Elvis growled and growled. Yancey Byrd reached down and touched himself. “Plenty for everybody,” he said.

“Emily, get out of here,” Lulu said. Her voice was thin and frail, a sick child’s. Her eyes did not open.

“GET OUT!” she screamed, when Emily did not move. There was nothing of affection or recognition or even of human life in the scream. Before it died away, Emily was on her feet and running back down the black path.

“Run faster,”
Buddy said in her ear.
“Run harder!”

Emily tried, but her feet were numb with cold and her legs trembled so that it seemed like running in waist-high water, running in one of those run-but-don’t-get-anywhere dreams. She stumbled and fell and got up, and fell again. Behind her, Elvis barked and barked, his herding bark.

Midway back down the path the numbness wore off and Emily began to cry. Sickness and horror flooded her throat, and grief, and sheer revulsion. It almost doubled her over. She knew, suddenly, that something was coming after her down the path, something bound on consuming her, on doing her mortal harm. It was not Yancey Byrd; Emily heard the thin, lost wails start again from the banks of the dolphin slide and knew that he had what he wanted. But it was somehow
of
him. It rolled off him like smoke. It was dense and black and filled the world, stinking so of despair and sweat and sickness and fishy sex and utter corruption that she doubled over against the retching. Behind her, the darkness was boiling like smoke, thickening, moving inexorably, like a great autumn fog bank. If it overtook her she would drown in it, bobbling forever like a dead thing sunk to the ocean floor, slowly rotting, corrupted beyond reclamation. Doubled over, she faltered.