Sweetwater Creek

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Buddy began to read: “I went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head…”

  Emily’s very skin burned with recognition. She breathed in tremulously. A fire in your head…yes.

  And then he read, “And pluck, till time and times are done / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.”

  Emily began to cry.

  “I want to see that,” she sobbed. “I want to see the silver and gold apples.”

  “You do, every day and every night,” Buddy said. “This just gives you a different way to think about them. You’ll think of this poem whenever you see the sun, or the moon. I did after I first read it.”

  And Emily had.

  Two years later, when he was seventeen and Emily was ten, Buddy wet himself in his chair. Emily looked on in horror and sympathy as the pale urine dripped from the seat and soaked into the rug.

  “I’ll clean it up before anybody sees it,” she said, and got up to scurry for towels and a mop.

  Buddy did not answer. In his late teens his features had grown chiseled and high-planed like his father’s, and crowned with the same thick wheat hair. Now his face was white and blank as he stared straight ahead.

  “Get out of here, Emily,” he said, without looking at her. Emily got.

  The next day, while Emily was at school and the men out with the dogs, Buddy somehow managed to shoot himself in the head with the antique Purdey shotgun Walter had given him on his sixteenth birthday. It was a legendary gun, Walter said, made in England just after the turn of the nineteenth century, for an unremembered Englishman named Carter, and had belonged to the oldest son in the Carter line ever since, passed on down over the years. Her father had coveted the gun, Emily saw, caressing and polishing it, hefting it to his shoulder, tracing with his fingers the intricate, age-smoothed design of ducks and swans and graceful reeds carved into the silver stock.

  Buddy cared nothing for it. After perfunctory thanks, he had put the gun away somewhere, and Emily had not seen it again. But he had obviously kept it at hand, for with it Buddy charged his old foe and cheated it.

  He left one note for his father and the boys, and since no one ever spoke of it, Emily never knew what he had said. He had left her one, too. In it were lines from another poem he had once read her, one by John Donne, that he said was the bravest and most gloriously human poem ever written.

  It read, in part,

  Death be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,

  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

  Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

  …

  One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

  And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

  At the bottom he had scrawled, “I got him, Emily.”

  After his funeral service, which Emily remembered none of forever after, her father and brothers took him to the old Carter family graveyard, in a grove of moss-scarred live oaks on a hummock in the far marsh. Emily took Aengus to her room and into her bed and held him through the afternoon and night and into the next day while he shivered and whined. Emily herself did not cry for Buddy; she never did. She simply stopped reading.

  That evening Walter took the legendary Purdey down to the great curve where Sweetwater Creek ran deep and dark, and threw it in.

  After that, Emily haunted the big, shabby house looking for a place to be. She went once or twice into Buddy’s room, but Cleta, weeping, had cleaned it antiseptically and put all Buddy’s personal things away, and there was nothing of him there, and consequently, nothing of her. The still, silent room and dead hearth frightened her. She began to spend all her time, except for family meals, with the dogs.

  Sweetwater Plantation bred and trained exceptionally fine Boykins descended from the original stock founded in Boykin, South Carolina. Walter had grown up there, working furiously to lever himself out of the hardscrabble farm existence his family led, and much of his work was in the homes and gardens and fields of people who bred and raised the chunky little bronze dogs. He came to know the myths and the realities of the dog: that it had originated with a stray puppy who followed a prominent citizen home from church one day; that it had been bred and interbred specifically to serve the needs of the Lowcountry waterfowl hunters. It was large enough and had enough stamina to retrieve for hours in icy water, small enough to fit neatly into a small boat, often with a blind attached. “The dog that won’t rock the boat,” was the dog’s unofficial slogan.

  The little dog had touches of this and that in his ancestry: Chesapeake Bay retriever, American water spaniel, cocker and springer. It turned out that the new breed was naturally affectionate in the house and joyfully enthusiastic in the fields and marshes. His dense, curly coat protected him from icy waters, his autumn-brown color effectively camouflaged him, and his stub of a tail did not disturb undergrowth and give away the position of the blind-hidden boats. He was equally at home flushing small waterfowl and upland birds: doves, turkeys, and ducks. He was even proficient at flushing deer. By the time Walter Parmenter met the Boykin spaniel, the dog had become a favorite with sportsmen up and down the eastern seaboard.

  Walter was enchanted with the little dogs, and watched and listened and learned. He mucked out kennels, fed and watered, exercised, and soon was allowed to help train the spaniels. When he went away on scholarship to a small agricultural college upstate he took his own Boykin, given to him by a grateful breeder, and he studied a great deal about animal husbandry and care. He entered field trials and hunt tests all over the South, with his own carefully trained spaniel. What time he had left over he and his Boykin hunted. By the time he met and married Caroline Rutledge Carter of Sweetwater Plantation, he was determined to be a breeder and trainer of extraordinary Boykin spaniels, and over the years he had become just that. He was at heart a simple and single-minded man, and he put all the focus and energy he had into the dogs. They flourished, bringing a steady, barely adequate income to the farm. Walter’s family, keenly aware that they were second fiddle at all times to a little brown spaniel, did not.

  When Emily came among the field Boykins, in flight from the dead house, Walter had a number of breeding bitches and sires, a constant supply of new puppies, well-built and well-kept kennels and runs, carefully groomed field facilities, and part-time workers and trainers. Emily had always loved the small puppies and the beautiful mothers and sires, but she had not been allowed to make pets of the kennel dogs lest it spoil their hunting temperaments. Avenger and Sumter were devoted only to her older brothers; they wagged their stumpy tails at Emily when she petted them, and sometimes licked her face. But there was no question that their hearts belonged to Daddy. Aengus was the most she knew of Boykins, and when Buddy died Aengus went to the family of a breeder in North Carolina who was seeking to improve his stock.

  Buddy had not allowed his dog to be trained for hunting, but Aengus came from magnificent hunting stock and was as close to breed standard as Sweetwater had. Walter got a princely sum for him. Emily and Aengus both cried when the North Carolina truck took him away, but her father had assured Emily impatiently that Aengus was going to the best dog’s life imaginable.

  “No, he isn’t,” Emily said under her breath. “He’s already had that.”

  She had been spending her afternoons exclusively with the kennel dogs and puppies for three weeks before Walter took notice of her. The day he saw her in the little fenced training paddock with a small puppy, he went out to chide her for making pets of pups that were destined to be gundogs and that only. And then stopped still by the fence to watch her.

  She was sitting on the dried grass with Ginger, a twelve-week-old of particularly opinionated temperament. Walter had been planning to start her on the basics the following week, and was rather dreading it; he anticipated a long struggle with the beautiful puppy over who was going to obey whom about what. The first thing a hunting puppy learns i
s to sit on command, and in Walter’s way this entailed a good bit of pushing the baby’s behind to the ground while saying firmly, “Hup!” and then repeating the process over and over.

  Emily, however, sat still on the ground and leaned her head close to that of the attentive puppy. She did not move, nor, for a long time, did Ginger. Girl and dog simply looked at each other out of hazel and golden eyes, respectively.

  Then Emily stood, and Ginger got up also, and stood attentively in front of her. Emily nodded. Ginger sat down. And did not get up.

  Finally Emily nodded and Ginger stood, waiting quietly in front of Emily. Emily nodded again, and again Ginger sat down and waited.

  Walter walked over to his daughter as casually as he could and said, “Can you do that again?”

  “I think so,” said Emily, and turned to the puppy once more, and nodded.

  Ginger stood up.

  “So…have you been working with Ginger for long?” her father said. “Because you know our Boykins are trained our own way. You ought not be meddling with their first lessons.”

  “Just today,” Emily said, looking at her feet. Her father’s impatience with her was worse, on the whole, than his indifference.

  “What are you saying to her? Are you whispering?” Walter said.

  “Nothing,” Emily mumbled.

  “Well, then, how do you get her to sit and stay like that?”

  “I just think it at her,” Emily said. “And I listen to see if she understands. And then I think at her what she should do. Ginger is real good at it. I don’t have to think it more than once, usually. She didn’t want much to stay, but it was because it bored her. I told her I really, really wanted her to do it. And she did. She’s a nice dog.”

  “Emily, that’s just wishful thinking, or something,” Walter said nervously. “It’s coincidence. You can’t think a dog into learning anything. You have to show them, over and over, and you have to do it firmly. Ginger just happened to want to sit down.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Emily said stubbornly. “I told you. It really bored her at first.”

  Her father looked at her silently.

  “Would you like to help me train Ginger?” he said. “We could start with walking to heel, since she seems to have caught on to sitting and staying. We could do a little bit tomorrow; I could show you how, and then maybe you could carry on with it by yourself.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, looking hard at him to see if he meant it.

  The next afternoon Emily and Ginger were waiting when Walter came into the paddock carrying a slip-cord leash, a choke chain, and a whistle.

  “What’s all that stuff for?” Emily said suspiciously.

  “Walking to heel is complicated. It takes a lot of repetition, especially with a dog like Ginger. Let’s see which of the collars she’ll work best with, and then I’ll start, and you can watch.”

  “Can I think with her a little while first?” Emily said. “She doesn’t like all that stuff you’ve got, and I don’t think she’s going to let you put it on her.”

  Walter stared at his daughter and the stiffly erect puppy, and then gestured helplessly.

  “By all means. Think away,” he said.

  Again Emily sat down in front of Ginger, and Ginger sat still and looked at her, head cocked. Presently Emily stood up and turned her back on Ginger and nodded. She walked away. Ginger got up agreeably and trotted along just behind her left heel. Emily turned to the right and left; Ginger turned, too. They made small circles in the paddock, then they turned and came back to Walter. Emily nodded. Ginger sat.

  By her tenth birthday Emily was regularly starting the Sweetwater Boykins off, and even taking a few of them through some of the more difficult steps: introduction to gunfire (with a cap pistol), single marked retrieves, double retrieves, water work. “But I won’t do birds, live or dead,” Emily said. “I won’t teach them to hunt.”

  “We’ll take them from there. You’ve given them a nice start,” Walter said, and it was as near praise from him as Emily had ever gotten. Emily’s part in the education of the Sweetwater Boykins was not mentioned outside the house. Her father continued to smile modestly at the compliments his impeccably bred and trained spaniels received, and sold them like hotcakes.

  On her tenth birthday, Emily went out to the bitches’ kennels to select her puppy. The newest litter was just three weeks old, and her mind and heart were made up instantly when a scrawny, ill-favored puppy tumbled out of the nest and toddled over to her and sat on her foot.

  “That’s no hunting spaniel,” her brothers jeered. “That’s a hound dog.”

  So Emily named him Elvis, and took the puppy to her room, and fell as irretrievably in love as she ever would in her life. Girl and dog were two halves of a whole, two chambers of one heart. The swirling black abyss that Buddy had left was almost filled. But only almost.

  He still spoke to her sometimes. Not audibly, but through the words of poets she had pushed far down and slammed a door on when he died. Sometimes they broke through, and then Emily knew that Buddy was with her.

  On this night the fast-falling dark caught them, and the moon was riding high and white when Emily turned to leave the creek bank and hummock. She stood in the darkness of the live oak grove for a moment, to watch the tapestry of silver tidal creeks and icy, gilded marsh. The bank down to the little beach where the dolphins slid was pure vermeil, every oyster clump and cypress stump and bleached shell inked in black.

  “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.” The words slid whole and perfect into her mind. She smiled slightly, a smile tightened with pain and softened with love.

  “Show-off,” she whispered, and turned to leave the hummock for the narrow path through the reeds and fields toward home.

  Elvis had gone ahead of her, and stood in the moonlight on the path, motionless and waiting. The wash of moonlight turned his chestnut curls to fire. Love smote Emily, pierced through her so quickly that it almost brought her to her knees. Love for the amber eyes on hers. Love for the tumbled curls. Pure love.

  “I love you, dog!” she called, and he wagged his nubbin of a tail, and girl and dog started for home.

  In point of fact, Elvis’s curls in the moonlight were the exact color of her mother’s as she stood in the dim light of the overhead globe in the farmhouse foyer, the last time Emmy ever saw her. But it was a long time before she realized that.

  2

  THERE WAS AN OIL PAINTING at Sweetwater Plantation over the dusty carved and gouged mantlepiece in the dining room. It was dark and brooding, and romantic in the extreme, Emily always thought. A pale, radiant orb that must have been the moon sailed high over the shallow-hipped roof, and beyond it the Wadmalaw River shimmered like quicksilver. Groups of graceful black men and women strolled about on the circular front drive, arm in arm, their mouths open, faces lifted up to a second-floor balcony, where a man and woman in eighteenth-century dress stood. Obviously, the black people were happy slaves, singing in the twilight to their master and mistress. Small black children tumbled and rolled in the smooth grass. Gigantic roses glowed palely in the twilight. The Spanish moss in the live oaks in the great allée were ghostly under the high moon.

  “It must be very old. It’s a real primitive,” Emily said on Thanksgiving afternoon, as she was dusting the heavy gold frame. Buddy had told her about the early primitive limners who came to Charleston in the late 1600s to paint the houses and families of the rich planters. She liked showing off her knowledge.

  She only dusted the painting twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Parmenters took virtually all their meals in the small breakfast room off the cavernous kitchen. It had once been a ladies’ morning room, Walter had told her, but no ladies had morninged in it for a very long time. Still, Emily loved the name and called it the morning room when there was no one around to correct her. The Sweetwater Plantation she lived in now had only a cluttered breakfast room in need of paint, but the Sweetwater of the painting undoubtedly ha
d a morning room.

  “I’ve always loved Sweetwater best at twilight,” Emily said to her aunt Jenny, who was polishing the silver service she had brought from her own house for the feast. It was, in fact, 1847 Rogers Brothers silver plate, and her aunt had bought it for herself after she divorced her feckless, philandering husband Truman, but Emily did not know that. She loved the sight of the ornate silver, gleaming in the light of the tall white tapers at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It spoke of a birthright that was, perhaps, only temporarily lost.

  Walter Parmenter loved it, too; he never failed to say at these holiday dinners that the Carter girls had always known how to set a fine table, and he had always meant to replace the family silver before Emily grew up. Everyone would nod pleasantly but no one spoke; they all knew that Caroline Carter Parmenter had taken the scant store of silver with her when she left. Emily did not even remember it. She did not want the silver replaced; she had no intention of presiding over a fine table with just-bought silver. Silver should come with the house and be as old as the family name.

  “That’s not twilight,” her aunt said acidly. “It’s years and years of smoke from the blasted chimney. The painting is of the house in bright sunlight, and it never had one single rose. My crazy aunt Harriet painted it in 1950. Your great aunt. The only other thing she ever painted was a pitcher of buttermilk with a zinnia stuck in it.”

  Emily did not look at Jenny Raiford. She knew that it was not an early limner’s work, nor twilight, nor any of the other things that she kept in her head and heart. The knowledge did not stop the needing, though. Emily needed Sweetwater to be as it was in the painting.