Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “My God. A theme park. Gullah World. That’s just extraordinary, Clay,” I said fiercely. Anger was beginning to raise its snake’s head. It felt good, like scalding hot coffee when you are frozen and exhausted.

  “It’s not like that. It could be done with great taste and dignity. Sophia Bridges…you know, the young black woman with the child…she has an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, and she did her thesis on the Gullahs. She’s going to do a great deal more research down here. She thinks it’s fascinating, and that it could be an important cultural asset to the whole region.…”

  “Sophia Bridges wouldn’t know a real Gullah if one tackled her and held her down and put her hair in cornrows! This is not an experiment, Clay! Those are real people over there! My God! And the ponies…what about the ponies? Are you going to open up a Wild West exhibit with them?”

  “The ponies are ultimately the responsibility of the government,” he said. “The Park Service. We’ve been talking with them for months about the ponies. They’ve given us at least six months to relocate them or to cull…”

  “Cull?”

  He looked away again.

  “They’re not healthy, Caro. They’re so inbred that their genetic weaknesses are going to kill them in another generation or two. They don’t get enough food, or at least not the right kind. They’ve just about grazed out the available hummock grass on the island. You can’t let them starve. They’ll be much better off on one of the undeveloped islands, where the grass is strong and new.”

  “They’re not starving, they’re fat as pigs,” I cried. “Clay, this is…I won’t do this, Clay. Not to the people, and not to the ponies. I will not give you that land.”

  He did not speak. I watched him, my chest heaving with rage and anguish. Finally he nodded.

  “Then, as you say, it’s your island,” he said.

  There was another long silence, and then he said, “Caro, I have to sleep. I’ll die if I don’t sleep. You should, too. I’ll talk to Hayes in the morning, tell him it’s off. The Atlanta people are still here; we can wrap it up before noon. But right now I’m just plain done for.”

  He turned over and reached up and pulled the chain on the bedside lamp. The room swam back into its comforting darkness. I heard him settle into his pillow and give the small sign that meant he was poised at the edge of sleep. I felt my heart contract slightly with the first frisson of pity. He had never before said he was too tired to talk to me. This must have taken a terrible toll on him. I remembered how it had been with him when he was first learning the island, in the summer days after Hayes had brought him over from Charleston the first time. I remembered the sheer enchantment on his face, the wonder in his blue eyes. You wouldn’t lose that, not entirely.

  I lay still, staring at the drawn curtains. A faint line of pale, colorless light had appeared under them. Dawn. The dawn of a day I wished I might never see.

  “Clay…” I said softly into the darkness.

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t there any other way? I mean, anything you could do so that the people at Dayclear and the…the ponies and all…could stay, wouldn’t be disturbed? Put it somewhere else on the island, or scale it down, or something?”

  After a long time he said, “We could try. If you’d agree to think about it, I’d agree to go back to the drawing board and see if we can’t do better for the people and the horses. We have until spring before we have to give the earnest money back. That money would keep the Calista investors off my back for a long time. Maybe long enough. I think we could…Caro? If we could show you how much better it could be? If we could show you it would really benefit the people at Dayclear?”

  “I…if you could really show me, I guess I could…think about it. I guess I could do that. But oh, Clay…”

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning, baby. I promise you we can make it work. I promise you it won’t be anything you’d have to hate.…”

  “Will you promise me something else?”

  “Anything.”

  “Will you promise me not to talk about it anymore until after the holidays at least? I don’t think I could stand it, Clay. I don’t think I can talk endlessly about this thing, or hear about it. Let’s just get through the holidays. It’s going to be bad enough, looking at all those poor, silly little new people and knowing what you brought them down here for.…”

  I should not have said it. No matter what, it was a gratuitously cruel comment, designed to hurt, and it did. I knew even before he answered that I had hurt him.

  “That shouldn’t be too hard,” he said in the chill, neutral voice I fear most. “We don’t talk about anything else.”

  I lay still, wrapped in my own pain, until I heard his breathing slacken into sleep. I meant to get up then, and go to try to sleep some more on my daybed, but before I could gather the energy I fell asleep, too, and when I woke, the sun was high and straight over the sea, and he was gone.

  7

  It’s funny how a night’s sleep can change the complexion of things. I couldn’t have slept more than five hours, but when I finally got showered and dressed and in some sort of forward motion, the terrible night before had faded and bleached itself down to a kind of half-memory, half-dream that lacked the poisonous immediacy of the night itself. I knew it was something I had done myself, while I slept, in order simply to survive and go on; I had done it sometimes when the pain of Kylie got too overwhelming. It was a kind of interior litany that threaded my troubled sleep and bore me up when I waked: Well, it was awful; it was the worst thing in the world, but here it is the next day and we’re still here. The sun is still shining, the birds are still singing. It isn’t going to kill us, and what doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger. There’s still Clay and me, the fact of us. There’s still that.

  I was so proficient at it that it was buried deep in my subconscious now, and I knew only that a night had passed and a day had been born and we were still intact. As long as we were, we could work this out. He had said so, hadn’t he? He had said they’d go back to the drawing board with ideas for Dayclear. He’d said we didn’t need to speak of it again until spring. It would take at least that long to come up with a better plan. I didn’t have to do anything at all about this until then. The light would have turned to pale, tender gold and the marshes would be greening up before I ever had to think of it.

  I ran down the stairs two at a time, eager to be out in the crisp, clear light that flooded the back garden. I would have coffee there, and then cut the last of the roses and bring them in. Then I would go back over to the island. There was one more thing I had to do before I could pack the enormity of Dayclear away.

  An hour later I stopped at the little unpainted cabin that had served the settlement as a general store and community center since I was a small child, to ask where Ezra Upchurch’s house was. I knew that Janie and Esau Biggins, who had kept the store almost that long, would know. They had served the settlement’s needs and wants and its deepest aches for forty years. And they were Gullahs, too, originally from Edisto. There was little about the people of Dayclear they did not know.

  The vertical planks of the little house were blackened with age and weather, and several had rotted through. The roof was rusted tin and missing many squares. The listing porch held a long-defunct metal Nehi cooler that squatted stolidly in a corner, like an abandoned god. Usually someone sat on it, or a group played checkers or cards on its pitted surface, but the day was sharp, and I knew that everyone would be inside, clustered around the black iron stove that would surely, as my grandfather always said, burn the place down one day. A few chickens pecked and scratched in the swept dirt yard and under the porch. They were Domineckers; I had always admired their precise tweed dress and vaguely African demeanor. They seemed to me so much more exotic than the fat, complacent Rhode Island Reds, almost as picturesque as the beautiful, witless, pin-head guineas that sometimes foraged alongside them. These did not stop their noshing as I walked through t
hem and up the steps.

  Inside, the thick, rank semigloom smelled of smoke and licorice and the dusty peanuts in their shells in a big barrel by the counter, and something else darker and older: dried blood from the carcasses of the chickens that were slaughtered out back and sold. I felt a little uncomfortable, for I knew that mine would be the only white face, but I had been here before, many times, and I was known. I would be treated with courtesy because of my grandfather. He would have been treated with affection.

  Janie was behind the counter this morning. She smiled her gold-toothed smile and nodded but did not speak. That was for me to do first, and I did.

  “I’m looking for the house Ezra Upchurch is staying in, Janie,” I said. “He’s got someone staying with him, a Mr. Cassells, that I need to see.”

  “Ezra, he stayin’ with his auntie down at the end of the row, but he ain’t to home,” she said equably. “Seem like he say he goin’ to town today.”

  I did not know if “town” meant the village on Edisto or Charleston or what, but it did not matter, since it was Luis Cassells I wanted. I was glad that I would not have to say what I had to say to him in front of Ezra Upchurch. The great wind of Ezra’s presence would, I knew, overwhelm me. This was going to be hard enough.

  “That’s okay. I’ll just walk on down there and see if Mr. Cassells is there. Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “I’m here,” a masculine voice said from somewhere in the gloom behind the stove, and I peered into it. Luis Cassells was sitting in a spavined old rocking chair in the shadows, drinking coffee and smoking a large black cigar. Both smelled good, rich and masculine. They reminded me of my grandfather. There was a cardboard box beside him on the floor, and I heard a scuffling and scratching from it. Walking back, I peered in. There were three small black and tan hound puppies there, curled around one another. Luis was scratching their heads with the hand that held the cigar. He smiled up at me, his teeth flashing white in the murk.

  “Pull up a chair,” he said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Or maybe you’d prefer a puppy. Esau’s trying to find homes for them. Their mama got run over on the bridge.”

  “I wish I could,” I said. “If he can’t place them, I’ll put a notice in the office. Where’s Lita this morning?”

  “Ezra’s auntie is teaching her how to wrap her hair. She’s been after me for a week to let her. Says that way I won’t have to comb it for days and days, and she won’t have to cry. She has a point. Combing hair is not one of my long suits.”

  I smiled. Then I said, “Mr. Cassells…”

  He raised an eyebrow at me and I felt myself blush, and was glad of the darkness.

  “Luis,” I said. “I came to apologize. I was pretty crappy to you yesterday. And…you were right about Dayclear. There are some plans to develop it. I didn’t know about them. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen; I do own this part of the island, and if it seems to me that the property would harm the settlement in any way, it’s not going to happen. Clay and I have an agreement about that. I thought you might pass the word along. Nothing at all is going to be done until spring, and then only with their blessing.”

  He studied me for a space of time.

  “I see,” he said. “Well, that’s good to know. Why don’t you come on back with me and tell them yourself?”

  “Because they’ll be more apt to believe it if it comes from you,” I said, knowing it was true. “They’re nice to me because of my grandfather, but I’m whitey all the same. We don’t have a great history of truth-telling in these parts. But you’re one of them. They’d trust you.”

  He laughed, the big, rolling laugh I remembered.

  “You’re right about that,” he said. “Nobody would confuse me with whitey.”

  I blushed again, hard.

  “I meant that you’re Ezra’s friend, staying in his house. That would be enough right there.”

  “I know what you meant,” he said, still chuckling. “You’re right. They’ve taken me and Lita in like family, God bless them. I think it’s because I’ve traveled such a long road. These are people that know a thing or two about journeys.”

  “You said you’d tell me about that road one day,” I said.

  “I did, didn’t I? Well, since you honored me with an apology…completely unnecessary, by the way…the least I can do is honor you with the absolutely fascinating, never-equaled story of my life. Capsule version. That is, if you’ll quit hovering and sit down and drink coffee with me.”

  I sat. He held up a finger and Janie brought two more cups of strong black coffee, smiling her gold-toothed smile as she did. It tasted strong and fresh and bitter, odd but good on this stinging day. I told her so.

  “I puts a big ol’ lump of chic’ry in every pot,” she said.

  Luis drained his second cup, set it down, and said, “Okay. Here we go. I was born…” And he grinned his pirate’s grin. “Don’t worry; it’s the abridged edition. I was born in Havana in 1939, or just outside it. My family was rich. My father was third in a line of doctors and gentlemen farmers, and we had what you all would call a country estate here. The finca, we called it. I was supposed to follow in the family tradition of medicine, but I hated everything about it, and by the time I was ready for college I knew that plants were going to be it for me. The old man was furious, but he had my younger brother already in the fold, so he paid for me to go to the university and start studying tropical botany. That was in 1957.

  “I got married the same year. We do that in Cuba, or did, especially in the wealthy old families. She was the daughter of a neighbor; just as rich as we were, and I’d known her since we were in diapers. Her name was Ana, and she was little and round and soft like a dumpling, with the most wonderful giggle. All she ever wanted was to be married and have children and live exactly like the women in her family had lived for generations. And we got a good start on it; our daughter, Anita, was born the next year, 1958. Anita, little Ana. God, she was a pretty little girl. She looked like a Christmas angel.

  “The next year Batista packed it in, on New Year’s Day, 1959, and the world we knew turned upside down. The revolution was supposed to be for all of us, but it was clear very soon that that didn’t include the quote, aristocrats, unquote. I could see what was coming, but my family never could, and Ana’s couldn’t, either. And her folks did a real number on her; when I begged her to bring the baby and come out with me, she wouldn’t do it. It was all going to blow over in a few months, she said. She would stay with her family on the estate and wait for me to get it all out of my system. Then we’d go on just as we’d planned. She wasn’t a stupid girl, but she was totally of her time and class, and she couldn’t imagine that anything could ever change, even after it did.

  “So. I got out with a young uncle on a commercial fishing boat out of Miami, and I stayed with some relatives there. There are Cassells all over the place. These didn’t have half the money my folks did, but they were realistic about Cuba under Castro. They knew I couldn’t go back. They found a job for me in a little Cuban radio station and I sent home what I could. I never knew if any of it got there or not. I didn’t hear from Ana and the baby for almost a year, and by then things were pretty bad for all of them, my folks included. There wasn’t a prayer of Ana getting out while the baby was so small. She wouldn’t, anyway. Her family was in terrible shape, trying to do farm work for one of the cooperatives and dying from it. She wouldn’t leave them. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t going to see them again, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself.

  “I went back to Cuba in April of 1961 with the invasion forces that the CIA trained in Florida and Guatemala. I was captured almost before I put a foot on the beach and spent a year and a half in prison down there. I try not to talk about that year and a half. They let me out just before Christmas of 1962, and I was going to go and find my family, but I was met at the gate by a friend of my family in Miami and taken straight to the harbor at midnight, and put in the hold of a sailing sloop that belonged
to some rich German dude who knew my uncle. That was the last time I saw Cuba.

  “In 1963 my uncle sent me to Cornell and I got a graduate degree in tropical botany. I finished in 1966, with about as much chance of making a living in my specialty as if it had been sword-swallowing. But I’d met some people and learned some things at Cornell, and those months in that prison made something of me I’d never been before. There was a guy in Miami then, a fantastic man named Jorge Mas Canosa, sort of the legendary king of the anti-Castro exiles. The word ‘charisma’ might have been invented just for him. He founded the anti-Communist Cuban American Foundation, headquartered in Miami. It was the daddy of all the anti-Communist movements. He modeled it after your American political action committees, and he raised a ton of money for the movement, and got out the exile vote for the Republicans year after year. He was the most alive human being I ever saw. I would have followed him into hell. In a way, I did.

  “He couldn’t use a botanist, but he could a radio-TV announcer. He got me into Radio and TV Marti, his propaganda voice, which was nothing if not controversial in those days, and I just ate it up. I did everything. I read the news and played the music and kept the station logs and sold airtime and even had my own slot singing once, when we ran out of money and he couldn’t get anybody else. But then I started to drink, which was almost endemic in the exile community in those days, especially among the ones of us who’d been in the invasion and in prison. Big man stuff, you know. I was one of the ones who couldn’t handle it. It didn’t take me long to go the whole way down. I was born to be an alky. I make a better drunk than I do anything else, probably. I got so bad on the air that he didn’t have any choice but to fire me. Even I knew that. So I drifted around, doing landscape work and whatever radio and TV I could get. I didn’t hold on to any of it. I never remarried and I never stayed with any woman long enough to settle down. I was married to the bottle, and that’s no joke. I’ve done essentially that from the late seventies until now, only I’ve done the last eight years of it sober. I met Ezra in Charleston when he was speaking there, and he had this afternoon jazz and talk program on a station out on Wappoo Creek Road, and he put me on with him, and we played music and needled the conservatives and he let me help him with some of his organizing. I helped organize the sanitation workers on John’s. It was as big a thrill as I’ve ever had. But mostly I just do the radio program and what landscaping and consulting I can pick up.