Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “And why is that?”

  “Because there’s something in you that won’t stop until you’re dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ve always known that. There’s something in you that doesn’t have any limits. And you can’t let go of all that precious pain, or you won’t. It’s a shitty combination, and I’m not going to sit around and watch you self-destruct.”

  “So who asked you to?” I said, shame and anger stinging in my throat. “I don’t remember asking you to be my own private temperance society. And as for my pain, as you call it, what do you know about my so-called pain? When have I ever mentioned it to you?”

  “You don’t,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “We all know you’re too brave to mention that you’re in mortal pain almost every waking minute of your life. God, everybody who knows you tiptoes around scared to death they’re going to slip and mention death or daughters. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to just ask you if your daughter was still dead.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  “How dare you?” I whispered. “How dare you talk to me like that? I’ve never…I don’t…you talk like I use Kylie or something, like I…hug it to me, like I cherish it…”

  “Don’t you?” she said, and then shut her eyes. “I’m sorry. That was rotten. But I hate to see this, Caro. I always thought of this place as somewhere you could come that was safe, where you didn’t feel hustled or threatened, or need to drink. I didn’t worry about you when I knew you were out here. I don’t want to have to start now.”

  “So don’t,” I said snippily. “How did you know I was out here, anyway? For that matter, how did you know I drank half a bottle of bourbon?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. As for how I knew, a little bird told me.”

  I saw it clearly, with one of those swift, untutored leaps of connection that you make sometimes, for no reason at all.

  “He told you, didn’t he? That awful Cassells man…Lou, or whatever his name is. Okay, Lottie, so how do you know him? As if I had to ask.”

  She grinned. It was her old grin, full and gleeful and lewd.

  “I know him just the way you think I do,” she said. “And I’m damned glad I do. He’s as good a lay and as good a man as I’ve met on this island in a coon’s age, and as long as he wants to drop on over of an evening, I’ll leave the light burning for him. He’s not a bad art critic either, among his other more obvious talents. I purely love fucking a man who can talk about something afterward beside his orgasm. I thought you all would meet eventually, but I can’t say I had anything like this morning in mind.”

  “He told you all about it, undoubtedly.”

  “Of course. He has no secrets from moi. He was worried about you, incidentally. He doesn’t go around gossiping about the boss’s wife just to be doing it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure not,” I said nastily. “Did he happen to mention that he insulted me? And that he calls Clay Mengele?”

  She gave a whoop of laughter and doubled over.

  “Oh, God! How perfect! I’ll never be able to look at him with a straight face again.…”

  “Goddamn it, Lottie!”

  She held up one hand, palm out, gasping for breath.

  “Okay,” she croaked. “All right. Truce. I’ll lay off Men—Clay if you’ll go take a shower and toss the booze and let me feed you lunch. When did you eat last? Never mind. Shem just brought a mess of crabs in. I’ll boil if you’ll crack.”

  And because it was Lottie, and because I felt shamed and diminished and out of control and frightened by that, I did as she said. I climbed, shaking, into the shower and let the reeking hot water wash the agues and wobbles out of my head and muscles, and she tossed the liquor. I heard her ferret out the remaining bottles of Wild Turkey, heard them clink into the trash sack, heard the back door slam and a bit later her car trunk, and knew that she would haul them out to a Dumpster someplace. I felt better after that, as if a loaded gun had been taken out of my house. She was right. I had fouled my own nest last night and today. I did not intend it to happen again.

  A little later we sat at the scarred old picnic table out behind her gas-station studio, cracking open the hot boiled blue crabs and picking the sweet meat from the shells. My hands and face were sticky with crab juice, and I could feel my forehead and scalp stinging from the spurted juice of an errant lemon. I imagined that I smelled about as bad as I looked, but I felt much better. Fresh crabs and Lottie have that effect on me.

  Somewhere during the late lunch we had arrived at a tacit agreement not to speak of my drinking again, or of Clay, and I felt lulled and warmed by the sheer, rank, earthen force that was Lottie. The hangover was all but gone. So was the residue of last night’s eeriness, and the near-madness. I could even speak lightly of it, and found that I wanted to.

  I told her about seeing the child in the fog, and about sitting there in the firelight, drinking and waiting, and about waking to the laughter, and then running down the steps to meet not a revenant Kylie, but a strange, near-mute Cuban child and her black-furred grandfather. I even laughed a little, at myself and my lunatic, fog-fed fancies.

  She did not smile back. Her eyes were dark with pity and something near fear.

  “You want to stick a little closer to the world for a while, Caro,” she said seriously. “I feel like this is a dangerous time for you. I don’t know why, but I do feel that. Maybe you ought to lay off the island for a spell.”

  “Well, I will, I think,” I said. “It’s so close to Thanksgiving now, and there’re a bunch of new kids in, and Clay’s going to want to do that ghastly Lowcountry Thanksgiving thing for them and all the others who don’t go home, so I’m just about out of time. Besides that, I don’t want to run into Mellors the gamekeeper again. He could ruin a place for you in a New York minute.”

  She leered at me.

  “I see the sexual aspect of the man has not escaped you. It’s pretty powerful, isn’t it? For an old man and a grandpa, he flat reeks of it. I gather he pointed out the similarity of your—ah, situations, yours and his and Lady Chatterley and company. He laughed like a hyena when I mentioned it.”

  “It was your idea, was it? I might have known he’d never think of it by himself. What, a little pillow talk or something?”

  “Or something. I did tell him about you, for what it’s worth. He was curious about Clay, about what sort of wife he would have, what sort of children. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him about Kylie. That’s for you to do or not, as the friendship progresses.”

  And she smiled at me again, a wolflike baring of her big teeth.

  “There’s no friendship to progress and there isn’t going to be,” I said. “He’s arrogant and insufferable, and if it weren’t for his granddaughter I swear I’d try to get Clay to fire him. She’s crazy about the ponies, though. She talked for almost the first time since her mother died when she was with them. It’s the saddest thing, Lottie.…”

  “I know the story. You’re right. It’s awful. Well, I don’t think you need to worry about him hanging around. He’s pretty busy over in Dayclear, from what he says. He also said he has no intention of bothering you again, said for me to be sure to tell you that. He was only there today because the kid ran away. But you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. He’d make you a good friend. You don’t have so many of those around here that another one wouldn’t help. Come to think of it, he’d make you a good…whatever else, too. A tad of Lady Chatterley would do you a world of good, no doubt about it. And I sure don’t mind sharing. There’s enough there to go around.”

  “I’m going home if you’re going to talk like that,” I said, face and neck burning. The thought of those dark hands and arms, those heavy shoulders, that black hair…would it be coarse? Silky? How would it be?

  I got up and ran water from the outdoor spigot over my sticky hands and hot wrists, letting my hair fall over my face so that she could not see the flush. I
heard her chuckle. To divert her, I said, “You know what he said? He said Clay’s going to put a property, a resort community, right smack in the marsh where the river and creek meet, where Dayclear is. He says Clay hired him as a consultant about subtropical plants and landscaping for it. I think he must be really crazy. You know that’s my land. You know I’d never let anything like that happen on the island. And you know Clay knows that, too. Next time you see old Babalu or whatever you call him, you might enlighten him about that. I certainly didn’t get very far trying.”

  When she did not respond I straightened up and looked around. She was looking at the ground, and her face was very still. Lottie’s face is many things, but almost never that.

  “Lottie,” I said tentatively.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “You ought to talk to Clay about that.”

  “Well, of course I will, but don’t you think it’s the craziest thing you ever heard?”

  “I’ve heard lots of crazy things, Caro,” Lottie said. “Somehow that’s not the craziest.”

  “But, my God…”

  “Ask Clay. I don’t know. I try to know as little about what goes on in his mind as possible. You know me. Just a little ol’ trailer tramp, only interested in fuckin’ and drawin’. Speaking of which, I’ve got a painting drying up on me in the studio where I just walked out and left it when I heard you were on a private toot on your private island. I need to get back to it and you need to get on home.”

  “Lottie…”

  “Home, Caro. Not the island. Home. Okay? I’m going to call you in an hour and see if you’re there, and if you’re not I’m going to call the sheriff to go out to the island and get you. Now go on. Git.”

  She turned and stomped back into the studio, leaving the litter of crab shells and paper napkins reeking in the sun. I got up, fuming at her high-handedness. Under it all there was a small, cold curl of fear, like a worm.

  It was close to five when I got home. I knew that Estelle would be gone, but she had left the kitchen and downstairs sitting room lights burning against the darkness that comes early off the ocean this time of year. I was glad. The wind had picked up and I could hear the surf, usually flaccid and sullen, booming hollowly on the shore beyond the house, and the palms rattling fretfully. It is the time of day that I like least in winter, and I went into the house singing loudly simply because I hate to be answered by nothing but wind and sea.

  “‘Trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let fifty cents,’” I wailed in my frail soprano.

  I would light a fire in my little upstairs sitting room, I thought, and take a supper tray up there, and find an old movie on TV, and drift off to sleep on my quilt-piled daybed, and when I woke it would be to the sound of Estelle singing gospel down in the kitchen and the smell of coffee. And then I would find out where Clay was staying and I would call him, and he would tell me when he was coming home, and the free fall of the past two days would stop, and the orderly quadrille of my life on Peacock’s Island would resume again. I realized that I was missing Clay very much. I missed Carter, too. Maybe I would call him tonight. Except that I almost never caught him in, and for some reason that depressed me. Oh, well. He would be home for Thanksgiving, and that was less than a week away.

  There was a note from Estelle on the counter. It was sitting under the steam iron. I walked over and looked at it.

  “It have play out,” the note said, and a fat black arrow pointed to the iron. I felt a smile twitch at my mouth, and then banished it. Clay thought Estelle’s notes to us were wonderfully funny, but I did not, and I usually threw them away before he saw them, lest he take them to the office and show them around. More than once Hayes Howland had quoted an Estellism at a party, and I resented it sharply. Illiteracy in any permutation is not amusing to me. I was about to pick this one up and throw it away when I noticed that another arrow directed me to turn the paper over. I did.

  “Mr. Clay be home tonite,” it said. “He coming by privet jet. Home by midnite.”

  I did smile then, both at “privet jet” and the fact that Clay would be home by midnight. I wondered whose private plane he might be taking. He was adamant that no such amenity be purchased for the company, except for a small twin-engine Cessna that was virtually a necessity for island-hopping among the company’s properties. When he traveled he was scrupulous about flying coach, and he insisted that everyone else on company business do it, too. He even turned his frequent flyer mileage back to the company. Hayes ragged him incessantly about it.

  The house seemed to settle in around me all at once, fitting like a sweet skin. The dark night stopped pressing against the windows and wrapped them tenderly. I lit the logs in the big sitting room so that the house would smell of apple wood and peeked into the oven. Estelle had left a pot roast there, ready to be heated. Clay’s favorite. That and some of the Merlot he had brought back from Atlanta the last time he went, and the last of the key lime pie we had had the weekend before…or, no, I would make something for dessert. It would pass the time, and please Clay, and I suddenly wanted very much to be in my own kitchen, making something wonderful with my own hands. I looked into the refrigerator. Creme caramel; we had everything I needed. When I went upstairs to our bedroom, I was nearly dancing on the steps.

  He was late coming. At one A.M., I gave up and went upstairs and turned on my little television and found a rerun of Pillow Talk and fell asleep before Doris Day even had time to get pertly angry with Rock Hudson. I don’t know how much later it was when a sound from the kitchen woke me. I got up and ran my hands through my tousled hair and shrugged into the nicest negligee I had, and hurried downstairs. I was not afraid. I knew it would be Clay.

  He did not hear me coming in my bare feet. He was sitting at the kitchen table with the platter of cold, uncarved pot roast and vegetables in front of him, hands in his lap beneath the table, staring into space. I had never seen him look so old, or so tired, or so…ill? I was afraid suddenly, so afraid that for a moment I could not get my breath to speak. I remembered Shawna’s words the day before…or was it the day before that?…and that I had brushed them aside impatiently.

  Then I said, “Honey?” and he looked up, and his face was Clay’s again, with only the normal fatigue of a late night home from a business trip on it.

  “Hi, sweetie,” he said, and got up, and came over and hugged me. His face against mine was cold, but his arms were tight and hard around me, and he held me for a long time. I hugged back, eyes closed, my face pressed into his shoulder.

  “You hopped a ride on a jet,” I said, still close against the fabric of his coat.

  “Yep. The guys we went to see were coming to Charleston anyway, and I talked them into staying over a day or two with us. Well, not with us. I put them in the guest house, now that the new kids are in their own places. It saved me a bad three hours in the Atlanta airport.”

  “Clever,” I said, kissing the side of his face. I felt stubble there, and was surprised. He hardly ever allowed a trace of growth on his chin. He must have skipped shaving that morning. I had never known him to do that in all the years we had been married, and the anxiety came nagging back.

  “Are you okay?” I said, leaning back to look at him. “You looked awfully beat up there for a minute, and Shawna was carrying on the other day about being worried about you. Your health, I mean. I blew her off; I thought she was just being Shawna. Should I have?”

  He made a small, disgusted noise.

  “You should have. She drives me nuts with that sweet-concern business. I’m thinking about assigning her to Hayes. He can’t stand her. Yes, to answer your question, I’m okay. I just hate Atlanta. And I’m getting really sick of this money-raising business.”

  “Why don’t you let somebody else take that over?” I said, picking up the platter and putting it into the microwave. “Surely Hayes could do it by himself by now; he goes with you every time you go.”

  “Most investors still want to see the honcho do his dog
and pony show,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Makes ’em feel like they can jerk him around. Which of course they can. You want a glass of wine while that’s heating?”

  “No,” I said, perhaps more forcefully than I meant to, and he shot an oblique look at me but said nothing more. He poured himself a glass and sat back down at the table.

  “So tell me about the island,” he said. “I assume you stayed over there? Shawna said you hadn’t called in when I called the office.”

  “I was going to call her in the morning and find out where you were and all that,” I said. “Yes, I did stay over. It was awfully foggy, but I got some nice watercolors started, and one morning of photographs. Oh, and I saw Nissy and she has a colt! Wouldn’t…isn’t that something? You remember, we’ve never known how old she is, so we thought maybe she was too old to have a baby, but apparently not. I’d love to know who the daddy is. Oh, and I met that new man of yours. That Lou Cassells person. He came over looking for his granddaughter. She’d run away after the ponies and ended up at the house.”

  “Cassells…” he said reflectively. “Oh. Yeah. The plant guy, the Cuban. His granddaughter was at the house?”

  “Yes. Apparently she saw the ponies and had been chasing them around for a while, and sneaked out early yesterday morning and followed them over to our place. I’d been feeding them, so they’re hanging around. She’s a nice child, about five, I guess. There’s a sad little story about her I’ll tell you sometime, but right now you need to eat and then I need a snuggle, and there’s just no telling where that could lead.”

  I smiled at him and he smiled back. I did not mention seeing the child the night before, in the fog, and wished that I had not mentioned Lou Cassells, and wondered why I had. That could have waited for morning. This was not the time for that. Perhaps there would not be a good time for it. Perhaps I would, after all, just let the whole thing lie. I did not want to tax my tired husband with that can of worms. It all seemed, suddenly, so absurd as to have been a fairy tale, something I had heard long ago.