She winced as she slipped her foot into one.
“Too small?”
“No, blisters from last night,” she said and pulled her foot out.
Henry jogged back to his Jeep to get his machete. Eliza climbed into the small camouflaged aluminum boat and watched as Henry returned and placed the machete in the boat. He untied the boat, pushed it away from the dock, and jumped in. He yanked the electric motor to start. When they reached the river, he pointed the boat south toward Jehossee Island and pushed the motor full tilt.
They were going fast now across the smooth river. Eliza leaned to one side and skimmed the palm of her hand across the glossy gray surface. Here she was in a small boat headed south, and somewhere off the coast of Scotland, Jamie was headed west. The North Atlantic would be rough, and his large sailboat would have to fight every inch of its way west. Their destinations—the swamps of the South Edisto and the barren windswept rocks of an Outer Hebrides island—could not be more different, and yet both she and Jamie could get lost. But she wouldn’t, because she was with Henry. Henry knew every inch of his world, and she felt safe with him. Jamie was always going to some new place, where he observed and reported, and he relied on others—on guides and sailing crews and pilots—to get him to his destination. In some ways Jamie documented what Henry lived.
As the boat skimmed past Willtown Bluff and the vast rice fields of Dodge Plantation, Henry leaned forward and cupped his hands around his mouth, “Just bought by some fellow from Florida who made a lot of money in the video rental business.”
Eliza pulled hair from her face. “Why did the Dodges sell it?” She had met several grandsons of old Mr. Dodge at the Bachelor Ball many Christmases ago.
“Oh, you know, too many heirs, no real interest. Mr. Dodge died last year. Drayton said it went for a bundle.” Henry sat back up and turned his attention to the river. Eliza could tell he wanted to get somewhere before the light changed too much. The Edisto was considered one of the more treacherous rivers in the Lowcountry because of the number of hidden sandbars and unpredictable currents, but Henry knew the river better than he knew most things, and he made wide curves around unseen shallow areas. The sun had already lit the undersides of clouds and appeared to be chasing them west.
Henry loaded his camera and began taking pictures of the rising sun. The sky was now blurred with soft pinks and lavenders and blues. Eliza had never seen such skies in England. The sky from the kitchen window of her flat looked hard and cold and far away. She thought that if she could ever reach one of those hard London skies, she would be able to lean against it—that there was nothing behind it except more hardness.
A pink cloud with a lavender underside stretched across the sky, as if a banner connecting the cypress trees. Henry spotted a blue heron standing along the bank, and he motioned to Eliza that he wanted to get as close to the bird as he could. He cut the motor and let the boat drift with the outgoing tide toward the riverbank, then moved to the middle of the small boat, braced his legs, and held out his hand to steady her as she crouched past him to the back of the boat. He twisted the lens off his camera and replaced it with a larger one. When they were within thirty feet, the heron stretched its neck and lifted off low across the river. Henry followed the bird as it tucked its neck into an S shape and disappeared over a stand of cypress trees.
They shifted positions again, and Henry restarted the motor. “I’ve been watching herons all my life. The way they look back at you. I can’t tell if they’re really smart or really dumb.” He pointed ahead. “Jehossee Creek is just up there on the left.”
The small aluminum boat sliced quietly through the still water of the creek that snaked back and forth between rice fields on both sides. Jehossee Island had been owned by several prominent Charleston families but now was part of the ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge. It had once been one of the largest rice plantations, but it could only be reached by boat, and no attempt had ever been made to develop it. Eliza remembered seeing a black-and-white photograph of a Jehossee hunting party on display at the Charleston Museum—a double row of men, the front line kneeling and holding their guns across their knees. The men looked straight into the camera with a solemnity as if they had just come through a long campaign full of hard battles. Laid out on the ground in front of them were hundreds of ducks. At the men’s side, next to a mule and cart, stood six black men.
When the creek narrowed to barely twice the boat’s width, the rice fields gave way to swamps of cypress and tupelo and gum, whose thick bases rose from the shallow water and then tapered straight and tall. Their canopies reached wide with feathery leaves. Henry cut the motor and tilted it out of the water. He picked up an oar from the bottom of the boat and moved the boat forward by pushing the oar against the shallow bottom of the creek.
“We’re going to pull up just there.” He pointed to a narrow tip of land. “Put on those boots.” Henry spoke in a low voice and kept his eyes fixed on the spot ahead. “When I tell you, move to the very front of the boat, hold on to that rope”—he flicked his eyes to the rope curled in a sloppy circle on the bow—“and jump out.” Henry dug hard into the bottom of the creek and pushed the boat ahead. As the boat began to slide into the muddy bottom, he said, “Now.”
Eliza jumped into several inches of soft mud.
“Good,” Henry said, “don’t let go.” He picked up the machete and jumped. He took the rope from Eliza and pulled the boat up hard on the land. He wrapped the rope around a tree and knotted it with two strong pulls. “Just making sure it’ll be here when we get back.” He checked the camera that hung around his neck and patted his vest to check for rolls of film. “Okay, let’s go. Follow directly behind me. Watch where you step. Keep your eyes on the ground.”
“Where are we going?”
“Into the most beautiful cypress swamp you have ever seen. We can follow the dikes. They’re not too bad in most places. Won’t be any more difficult than Kensington High Street on the first day of Summer Sales.”
“Just how far do you think you can go with that metaphor?”
“Not very.” Henry looked back and laughed. Eliza stood back as he cleared an opening in the underbrush with his machete.
They walked across the top of an old rice bank that was now a tangle of roots and vines packed with dirt and mud. Henry turned around and checked on Eliza. He watched her wobble and almost lose her balance. He held his hand out to steady her. “Take your time. You’ll get used to the footing. I’ll slow down a bit.”
Eliza didn’t say anything, instead she concentrated on where she put each foot, careful to follow right behind Henry, careful not to fall in the dark water on either side of the dike, careful to watch out for snakes curled in the dark hollows of the cypress trees she passed. Henry held his hand up to halt and pointed to his ear. Far off they heard the staccato kuk-kuk-kuks of a woodpecker’s call. He looked high up the tree and pointed over his shoulder. “Pileated woodpecker, his call follows the same rhythm as his pecking.” Eliza looked where Henry pointed. She didn’t see anything except layers and layers of leaves and branches. They continued to move forward.
The woodpecker called again.
Henry turned back to Eliza. “When I was little, no matter what anyone told me, I was certain every time I heard that sound, it was Indians. Lawton won’t admit it, but I think that sound scares him, too.”
The bird called once more, and then Eliza spotted a black bird the size of a crow with a red crest and a streak of white down the side of its neck as it flew away.
Eliza looked at the “knees” of the cypress trees, the gnomelike protuberances of root systems that randomly stuck up out of the water around the trunks and provided a wide foundation for the tree in the soft swamp bottom. What would the English artist who had laid his twenty-meter spiral out of desiccated sticks and pocket compasses choose to make from this swamp?
“If you need to steady yourself take hold of my shoulder. But watch out for the knees, that’s where the c
opperheads and moccasins hide out—especially at this time of year.” A few yards later, he stopped and pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his shirt pocket.
“I hope that’s not your map,” she said.
He smiled and shook his head as he uncrumpled the small piece of paper. “If it were, you’d be in more danger than you already are.”
“You do know where we are, don’t you?”
He nodded and waved the paper in the air as he turned forward to continue. “Notes from Drayton. I just wanted to make certain I remembered everything he wanted.”
After a while Eliza had gotten the rhythm of walking so that she was able to look up and take in their surroundings. The air was cool with a faint trace of menthol. The canopy was so dense she could not see the sun. The little light that did make it through created eerie reflections of the tall trees in the still, brackish water of the swamp. Henry held his hand up, signaling for Eliza to be still. He focused his camera on two Great White Egrets, resting high in a tall cypress tree. In the still quiet of the swamp, the sound of his camera was amplified and sounded like the crack of small branches breaking in rushed succession. The large birds froze, then rose gracefully into the canopy for safety. Eliza judged their wingspan to be over five feet.
Soon they came to a large break in the dike. Henry surveyed the damage. “Let me see how deep it is,” he said and walked behind her and broke a four-foot branch from a sweet bay magnolia across his knee. The long branch disappeared into the water. “It’s probably a little too deep. It’s not so bad at low tide but that won’t be”—he checked his watch—“for a couple of hours. There’s a bank not too far back that intersects this one.”
They turned around, and fifty yards later, Henry took his machete and cut a large tangle of vines to open a path to another dike running perpendicular to the one they were on. Eliza followed him across the broken vines and branches. He walked ahead and continued slashing back the vines that had grown over the path so they could pass. Eliza was going to ask Henry how he didn’t get lost, but he turned and pointed to a large alligator that lay on the bank ahead. She guessed it was at least eight or nine feet. Henry aimed his camera, took a shot, and then stepped in the water to get a better view. She was surprised the disturbance didn’t startle the alligator. Henry crouched low and threw a stick into the water near it. With alarming speed, the alligator slipped into the water with a large splash and then resurfaced twenty feet away and turned toward them. Eliza grabbed Henry’s arm.
“You’re safe,” he said. “She just wants to see what disturbed her. She’ll leave us alone.” Henry took a few more pictures of the alligator’s head. Growing up, Eliza had always been told that the way to know the size of an alligator submerged in the water was to guess the distance in inches from its eyes to its snout. Eight inches meant the alligator was eight feet long, nine inches—nine feet long.
They continued on, and Henry took pictures of a stand of old cypress trees with bases four and five feet wide. At the base of the widest one, a single blue wild iris grew.
“We’re not too far from dry land. Just up here is a clearing with the chimney of an old rice mill. If it’s not too grown over, I’ll show it to you.” Eliza followed quietly behind Henry through the overgrown vegetation. He worked hard with his machete. “These multiflora roses are taking over this bank.” He stood up straight and pointed with his machete. “Look, they’ve crowded out almost everything else.” He resumed hacking away at the unruly, thorned bushes.
Eliza could have argued right there and then, as she had done with herself many times before, that after six, seven, eight, let alone ten years, she and Henry would have changed so much that there would be nothing between them. And despite all of her equations, why did it feel so thrilling to be following him into this swamp? She had left and been a part of other worlds—first New York and then London. Henry had never left. He had remained not because he wanted to, but because he had to, she understood that, but even so, ten years of such different worlds—wasn’t that enough to shift things between them so that even if they tried, they would never be able to fit together anymore? Maybe she and Jamie never even had a chance. Maybe somehow in the back of her heart these equations between Henry and herself had remained unsolved.
“It’s just up there.” Henry pointed to a large brick chimney that stood by itself. It was almost completely covered by dense, tight-leafed fig vines. The ground rose slowly and became increasingly firm until they found themselves in an open area of high land. The rising heat made Eliza’s lungs feel heavy—it was almost hard to breathe. Henry leaned down and picked up a feather from the ground. He showed it to her.
“Screech owl,” he said. “Look.” He ran his finger down one side of the feather’s shaft. “It’s why you never hear them. They don’t have vanes on both sides of the shaft, only on one.” He handed her the feather, and she ran her finger down the bare side.
“I didn’t know that.” She handed the feather back to him, and he tucked it into his back pocket.
They stood looking up at the two-and-a-half-storied structure. The bricks, not covered in vine, appeared large and irregular. The chimney’s broad base tapered into a tall column. “Very few of these left standing. I keep meaning to get the curator of the Charleston Museum down here to document it. The threshing mill would have been here somewhere,” Henry said, looking around where they were standing. With quick reflexes, he caught Eliza’s arm as she reached to pull the fig vine away from the base. “Careful.” He held her from moving forward.
She put her hand on her chest and stepped back. “You scared me.”
“Sorry, but last time I was here”—he pointed to a recessed area of the structure—“there was a den of copperheads right there.”
She took another step back. “How old do you think it is?”
“Don’t really know, I’d guess early eighteen hundred, given the size and shape of the bricks. They match the ones at Oakhurst. Come on, we can get back this way. I’ve gotten everything I can get this morning. The sun’s gotten too strong.” He adjusted the strap on his camera. “There’s one dike intact up there.” He gestured with his chin. “It goes along the river, it shouldn’t be too bad getting to our boat.”
CHAPTER SIX
IT WAS NEARLY TEN O’CLOCK WHEN THEY REACHED THE boat. The morning sun had compressed and weighted the air. Henry shoved them off with an oar. Eliza slipped her boots off and started to put her moccasins back on but changed her mind. The water was quiet, and the world seemed as slow and as silent as Eliza had ever felt. She had been in a boat with Henry countless times, just the two of them on some river or waterway going from one point to another. But now it felt as if he were taking her away from a world in which she had been perfectly balanced to another—a secret world, where gravity had shifted and destabilized her sense of equilibrium.
At the opening into the river, Henry lowered the motor and ripped the cord fast. The sky was now a robin’s egg blue dotted with cottony patches of clouds that were mirrored in the water. They slid silently past untouched marshes.
When they reached the boathouse, Henry tied the boat up and helped Eliza onto land. She stood and raised her arms to stretch her back. “You can leave those in the boathouse,” he said, referring to the boots she had borrowed. “We can get something to eat at the house.”
He placed his camera equipment on the backseat of his Jeep. Eliza dug her toes into the sandy ground not covered in grass. Just below the hot surface, the sand was cool and dry and silky. In England, she could never walk barefoot, even in the summer. If she and Jamie were out in the country, she would have to find some sort of waterproof boot to wear. As Henry and Eliza walked toward the house, a dragonfly hovered in front of Eliza, as if it recognized her and wished to guide her up the sloped lawn to the house. God, she was tired.
“It’s locked,” Henry said as they approached the house. “I keep a key around the other side.”
Eliza followed him to a large magnolia, where
he reached up and took a key from a nail placed high on the trunk. She did not follow him up the steps to the house. He turned around. “Coming?”
“I just wanted to see what this dragonfly would do if I stood still.” The dragonfly, its green body sparkling in the sun, hovered in place and then headed back toward the river. She held back a moment longer to slip on her moccasins.
The key didn’t want to move in the lock. Henry pulled the front door tight toward him and jiggled the key. “This lock’s always been difficult. I was out here a few days ago. I thought I’d fixed it. There,” he said and pushed the door open for Eliza to enter. “You remember where everything is?”
Across the threshold, the wall of cold air stunned Eliza. She tilted her head back and held her arms out to the side and turned around. “Air-conditioning? When did you put in air-conditioning?”
“Mother put it in after Father died. She’s never been able to take the heat very well. It’s not bad, is it?”
“Feels great.”
They entered a large wide hall that ran the length of the house and ended at a formal door with glass transoms that looked out over the river. The dark hardwood floors were covered with faded Persian carpets. Above the wainscot, the walls had been painted with scenes of the Lowcountry. Eliza walked ahead of Henry and examined the paintings of rice fields and swamps with nesting egrets. “I’d forgotten how beautiful these were. Anne de Liesseline painted them, didn’t she?”
“Yes, just after she came back from New York—sometime in the mid-1950s. When I first moved out here, she came out one afternoon and talked a lot about her past. She explained that she’d been studying at the Parsons School of Design and had fallen in love with someone, but her father didn’t approve, and the relationship ended—it’s something no one ever talks about—but she was in bad shape, and according to Anne, I think my father asked her to paint this mural as a way of helping her. I don’t think he had any idea it would turn out so well.”
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