Low Country

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  But he insisted.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I’d just toss and turn. Let me do this. I need to talk over some things with Carter, anyway.”

  “Does he know…about the company?” I asked.

  “Yes. I told him when I went to pick him up in Charleston. He took it better than I thought. In fact, it seems to be a challenge for him. He had some pretty good ideas right off the bat. He wants to stay here after this semester is over and help out, and I think I’ll let him. He might as well get his feet wet now as later, and a real crisis is not the worst way to learn a business. Everything after it will look awfully good.”

  “Well…if you think so,” I mumbled, hoping that there would be an after. “I’d like for him to go on and finish school, but it’s nice that he wants to come home and help you show the flag. It’ll be wonderful to have him around.”

  “Well, actually, he’s going to be in Puerto Rico,” Clay said. “There’s a lot of mopping up to do, and I thought he could take care of some of that for Hayes and me. We’ve got our hands full here and in Atlanta.”

  “Have they…have the Atlanta people gone back?” I said, not wanting to talk about it but feeling that I must ask. It was, after all, his future. His and mine.

  “Yep. They weren’t very happy about us wanting to go back to the drawing board, but they want this project awfully bad. They’re willing to give us a couple of months to come up with something else. Then we’ll see where we are.”

  “Clay…” I said, going to him and laying my head against his shoulder, “thank you for that. Thank you for trying again. Thank you for…not making me the heavy in this, and for not making me deal with it quite yet. I’ll do better about it a little later, I promise. I just…I can’t…”

  “I know,” he said, sighing into my hair. “Go to bed.”

  And for the next three days, I slept, off and on, as though I had been drugged. When I finally did wake up enough to know that I was slept out, it was the following Sunday evening, and the rain was still falling. So it was not until the Wednesday after that that Sophia and Mark and I set out in the Cherokee to see the Gullahs of Dayclear, as Sophia had said, in situ.

  It had faired off clean and crisp, but the ground was still waterlogged, and I knew the marshes would be a virtual soup. I wore the oldest jeans I had, and an ancient waxed cotton waterproof jacket, and the over-the-ankle L.L. Bean rubber boots that had been my winter marsh footwear for a decade. They were so salt-bleached and mud-caked that it was impossible to tell what color they had been. When I picked the two Bridgeses up at their smart little condominium in the harbor village, Sophia wore a linen safari suit almost the precise color of her skin and a smart felt Anzac hat. She was strung about with expensive leather cases holding cameras, a tape recorder, and a bottle of Evian. She looked, I thought, like Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

  Her little boy looked like a miniature Michael Jackson.

  “I’m not kidding,” I told Lottie later. “He’s so sort of carved and delicate and perfect that he doesn’t seem alive, and he’s paler than most white children; if it weren’t for a slight crinkle to his hair, you’d think he was Norwegian or something. And his eyes are this strange ice gray. I’m sure his father is white. But the real thing that stops you is this incredible air of…I don’t know, fragility. Otherworldliness. He reminded me of Colin in The Secret Garden. He looks like he might have been ill most of his life. And he’s so shy it seems like outright fear. He stood behind his mother the entire day, almost, and he didn’t speak a word until it was almost time to leave the island. And I saw him smile exactly once. I’d love to know what’s going on there. If he’s that frail, no wonder she guards him like a lioness. I keep looking for the right word for him, and I almost have it sometimes, but it gets away.…”

  “Fey,” Lottie said.

  “Fey…yes. But, Lottie, that means…”

  “Doomed. Soon to die. I know.”

  “Well, I didn’t get that impression; I don’t think he’s sick. He just looks like he might have been. But yes, that’s the word.…”

  It was a long time before I could think of little Mark Bridges in any other terms but “fey.”

  He sat silently and correctly on the backseat of the Cherokee as I drove us over the bridge to the island, and got out at the house when his mother told him to, but he stuck just behind her, and his eyes, as he took in the old gray and silver live oak grove the house stood in, and the vast sweep of the lion-colored marsh, and the tangle of silent green that was the river forest beyond it, were wide and white-rimmed. I did not think he had often been in places like this. Nor, it was apparent, had Sophia.

  “It’s stunning,” she said. “Primeval, really, isn’t it? We’ve been to several beaches around New England, but there are no marshes there, and nothing as wild as this. Look, Mark, see that big white bird? I’ll bet they have birds like that in Africa.” Turning to me, she said, “We plan a photo safari to Kenya when Mark is a little older. This will be a good start for him.”

  But I did not think Mark Bridges would be ready for Kenya anytime soon. The marshes of Peacock’s Island seemed to intimidate him thoroughly. He took hold of the edge of his mother’s jacket and did not let go until we had gone into the house. Then he sat on the sofa that faced away from the glass window wall, sipping the apple juice his mother had brought in one of her assorted leather pouches, and did not look at the marsh.

  Sophia did not prod him to be more adventurous, or try to explain his timidity, as many other mothers might have done, and I liked her for that. This kind of fear, I thought, could only be healed by the boy himself. He would find his own talisman against it, or not.

  “The place where we’re going isn’t so wild, Mark,” I said to him. “It’s a regular little village, where people have lived for a long, long time. There are little houses, and a store, and a tiny little church they call a pray house. I don’t think there are many children, but I know of one who might be around. She’s about your age, and she’s a little Cuban girl, from a country way down south in the ocean below Florida. She may not be there, though; she goes out with her grandfather a lot. He’s a very special kind of gardener, and he works all over the island. But the old people there know some wonderful stories and songs. Maybe they’ll sing some for you. And there’s a little herd of ponies somewhere close by, and one of them has a baby. Maybe we’ll see them.”

  Mark edged a little closer to his mother. Apparently ponies were not a part of his special reality.

  “We had a rather bad little scene with a horse in Central Park,” Sophia said matter-of-factly. “I’d rather Mark didn’t experience horses again until later.”

  “Well, these are very small horses, and quite shy,” I said. “But I doubt we’ll see them. They don’t hang around the village much. How about chickens? Is he okay with them? They’re all over the place in Dayclear.”

  “He’s seen them at the Central Park petting zoo,” she said. “I think he’ll be fine with them, if nobody talks about eating them. He gets upset when he thinks he’s eating anything that was alive.”

  “Well, I hope we don’t come across anybody wringing a hen’s neck for the pot,” I said more crisply than I intended. I was getting a bit weary of this pair and their strange, self-constructed universe.

  “Surely they don’t do that,” Sophia said, clearly disapproving.

  “Sophia,” I said carefully, “this is a real Gullah settlement, one of the longest-standing that I know of. They are quite isolated. They still live much the way they did a hundred years ago. They sing the old songs that originally came from Africa, and do the old dances, and tell the old stories, and raise their food and prepare it much the same way as they always have. They are quite poor by our standards, but they are self-sufficient and they do very well with what they have, all told. Their lifestyle is not the sanitized one we live. They kill chickens and they trap rabbits and they eat them. If that’s a problem for Mark—and I can see why it mig
ht be; that’s not a criticism—then maybe we should do this another day when he’s in school or something. You can let him experience it gradually and it will probably be okay.”

  She stared at me, as if to determine whether or not I was, indeed, implying criticism, and then shook her elegant head. Her hair today was sleeked back and tied with a leopard-printed chiffon scarf. The hat hung down her back from a cord.

  “No. It’s an authentic ethnic culture, and I don’t want him to be afraid of that,” she said. “We’ll talk about it all, he and I, when we get home and make a little parable of it. We do that a lot.”

  We finished our coffee and Mark his apple juice, and went down the steps toward the Cherokee, to set off for Dayclear. Just as we reached the bottom one, a great grinding roar burst into the clearing, and a spuming cloud of fine black mud swept, tornadolike, down the sandy drive, and we heard, over the roaring, shouts and catcalls and huge, raucous laughter. A hurtling shape burst out of the mud spray and I saw what it was: a great black motorcycle with two men astride it. They were shouting and beating on the sides of the machine, and laughing, looking for all the world like demented gods on a terrible deus ex machina. They were singing, too; under the bellowing motor I made out the roared words to John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillen: “‘I was walking down Hastings Street/I saw a little place called Henry’s Swing Club/Decided I’d stop in there that night/And I got down…’”

  We stood frozen on the steps. The motorcycle swept into the yard and past us, missing us by what seemed inches. It roared out of the yard, made a circle, and came burring down on us again. The two men called greetings and laughed loudly. I could not make them out for the fantail spray of wet black mud.

  Mark Bridges made a high, strangled sound like the squeak of a rabbit caught in a snare and threw himself down on the steps and rolled into a ball. Sophia hurtled off the bottom step like a missile. She ran into the path of the motorcycle and stood there, fists balled, screaming with fury. I could not seem to move.

  “Stop that, you sons of bitches!” she shrieked. “Can’t you see you’ve scared my child to death? Stop it this second or I’ll get the police on you!”

  The motorcycle skidded to a stop. The silence rang like a brass gong. Sophia did not move. The two men dismounted and came toward her slowly. I recognized Luis Cassells first, mud-spattered and windblown, his big, dark face crestfallen. Then I saw that the other man was Ezra Upchurch. He was even more mud-slimed and wind-savaged, but one would have known that squat, tanklike build and the massive, overhanging brow and the perfect blue-black of his skin almost anywhere. Practically every man, woman, and child in America had seen it in newspapers and on television since the late seventies.

  “Jesus, lady, I almost hit you,” he said, and the beautiful, coffee-rich voice seemed as familiar as a neighbor’s, because I had heard it so often over the air.

  “You almost hit my son, too, you complete, capering asshole,” Sophia spat, and I gasped, simply because the words were so at odds with her chilly elegance.

  “What’s the matter with you that you think you can come roaring in here on that thing and run children down? Mark is a sensitive child; it’s going to take me days to get him calmed down! I’m of a good mind to report you to the authorities and to Clay Venable. If you aren’t aware of it, this is his land you’re trespassing on. I happen to work for him, and this lady happens to be his wife.”

  Ezra Upchurch looked down at the crouched ball on the steps that was Mark Bridges. I had sat down beside him and put my arms around him, and I could feel the profound trembling that shook him like an ague.

  “I’m sorry,” Ezra Upchurch said. “I didn’t see the boy. I know whose land this is, ma’am. Hello, Caro. Haven’t seen you since you were in training bras. Come a long way, I see. Ma’am, my name is Ezra Upchurch—”

  “I know who you are,” Sophia said. “It doesn’t make you any less an asshole.”

  Luis Cassells laughed.

  “She’s got you pegged, Ezra,” he said. “Caro, I apologize. This is my fault. Shem was crabbing under the bridge when you came over and when we stopped to talk to him he said he’d seen you come this way with a…real fine-looking young lady. He didn’t say anything about the boy. We wouldn’t have scared him for the world. We were just…having fun.”

  “Oh, God, Luis,” I said, my heart still hammering. “You could have killed somebody. Mrs. Bridges is new with the company, and I was about to bring her over to Dayclear. She’s doing…some research for Clay. But I think maybe we ought to get the little boy home.…”

  Ezra Upchurch walked close to Sophia Bridges. His coal-black eyes, lost in ridges of pouched flesh and a network of fine wrinkles, lingered on her, taking in the exquisite carved face and the long, slender body and the safari outfit.

  “I do apologize,” he said. “Let me make it up to your boy…”

  He started for the steps, where Mark had begun to sob. He did not move to uncoil himself from the anguished ball. Through the silky fabric of his little Shetland sweater I could feel his heart going like a trip-hammer.

  Sophia Bridges moved like a cat. In a split second she stood in front of her son on the bottom step.

  “If you touch my son I’ll scratch your eyes out,” she said in the cold, pure voice I had first heard at the guest house. “That’s before I call the police.”

  He stopped and studied her. Then he smiled. It was a lazy, insinuating, completely sexual smile. I felt its sheer wattage even though it was not directed at me.

  “Unnnh…uh!” he drawled. “What we got here?”

  The lapse into street black was as deliberate as a pinch or a leer. Sophia Bridges’s face blanched with fury.

  I stepped in then.

  “Sophia, there are chocolate chip cookies and fresh milk in the fridge, and the coffee’s still hot,” I said. “Why don’t you take Mark in and give him some, and I’ll just say good-bye to these two…gentlemen. I agree with you, they were foolhardy, but I know they didn’t mean any harm. Mr. Cassells here has a granddaughter that he dotes on; you know, the little Cuban girl I was telling Mark about. And Mr. Upchurch was born and grew up in Dayclear. If you can find it in your heart to forgive him, he can tell you almost anything you might want to know about it. You couldn’t have a better tour guide. He knows things I never will.”

  She said nothing but lifted her child up and carried him bodily into the house. I would have thought his weight, frail as he was, would be too much for her slender arms, but she carried him easily. I could hear Mark still sobbing into her shoulder, but it seemed to me that the sobs were growing fainter. Sophia did not look back.

  “I thought maybe the little boy might like a nice, slow ride on the cycle,” Ezra Upchurch said, pitching it just loudly enough for Sophia and Mark to hear. “The kids in Dayclear love it.”

  “Over my dead body,” she flung back over her shoulder.

  But Mark lifted his strange, tear-drowned little face for a moment and looked at Ezra Upchurch, and then at the motorcycle, before lowering it again to his mother’s shoulder. Ezra made the old peace sign with his fore and middle fingers and smiled broadly at the boy. That smile had bent tougher spines than Mark Bridges’s. Just before he tucked his face back into its nest of expensive Armani khaki, I thought I caught the faintest ghost of an answering smile.

  I stood looking at the two men.

  “Good work, guys,” I said. “Maybe she won’t call the police, but she’s going to tell Clay, sure as gun’s iron.”

  “Not Mengele! Oh, no,” quavered Luis Cassells, and I glared at him.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Ezra Upchurch said equably. “Look, I am sorry, Caro. I guess she’s got a right to be pissed. What’s the matter with that boy, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe he’s been sick. And he’s a long way from home, and he probably misses his father. They’re divorced. She’s pretty protective of him.”

  “She’s pretty, period,” he said, grinnin
g. “But that mama is way too much mama for me. Whoo-eee!”

  Then he fell back into the perfect, Harvard-inflected English that was one of his hallmarks.

  “I hope you’ll persuade her to bring the boy on over to Dayclear,” he said. “I’d like to make this up to both of them. If it’s…ah, research I believe you said…that she’s after, I’d be delighted to play cicerone for her. You, too. I’d like to catch up with you. I know what you’ve been doing since I saw you last, but not how you feel about it. Will you try to change her mind?”

  “I will, but don’t count on it,” I said.

  But to my surprise, Sophia Bridges decided to go on to Dayclear. When I got inside she was sitting with Mark at the kitchen counter drinking coffee while he finished his milk and cookies, and both of them were neatened and brushed and face-washed and composed again.

  “Mark has decided he wants to go,” she said. “So we will. We’ll leave now. But I’m adamant that I don’t want that motorcycle anywhere around. I must insist on that, Caro.”

  “I’m sure Ezra can hide it in the swamp or something,” I said, amused and not a little annoyed at her peremptoriness.

  She stared at me hard.

  “He better do that,” she said without smiling, and I sighed, and we left for Dayclear.

  8

  In fact, he had done just that. When we got to the general store, I saw the motorcycle deep in the tangle of scrub and kudzu out back, hardly showing at all. Only its crusted headlights were clearly visible. But I was looking for it, and had no trouble spotting it. I do not think that Sophia Bridges saw it. She had begun photographing when we reached the sand road that led in through the woods to the settlement, leaning out the window and imploring me to go slower. When we rounded the last curve and the general store was in sight she was intent on capturing a back view of an old man leading a spavined mule down the road. Both wore straw hats. Mark may have seen the cycle, though. I heard a soft gasp from the backseat that I somehow did not think was alarm, but whether he was intrigued by the motorcycle or the chapeau-clad mule and its owner I did not know.