One of these was in the mountains of North Georgia and was called Hillbilly Hollow. I would like to think that the name was someone’s idea of tongue-in-cheek, but after we had driven through it, I abandoned that idea. Hillbilly Hollow was a caricature of every bad joke anyone had ever heard about the Appalachian mountains and the people thereof. By the time we left it I did not know whether to laugh hysterically or simply cry.
At the gate was a security guardpost gotten up like a miniature log cabin. Artificial chickens, pigs, and dogs dotted the little backyard. On the leaning front porch a guard sat in a rocking chair, dressed in tattered overalls and with a torn felt hat pulled down over one eye, holding a shotgun in his lap. A rustically lettered sign on a piece of knotty pine said, STATE YO’ BIZNESS POLITE-LIKE. This particular guard wore wraparound yellow sunglasses and was reading Rolling Stone, but the effect was hardly diluted.
Inside the gates was a sales office in the same cabin style, but much larger, dripping with calico and gingham and more rustic sayings burned on pine. A woman in a calico dress and apron, with breasts like, as Clay said in wonder later, the bumper of a 1953 Studebaker, gave us literature about the different styles of resort homes and rentals available, and the amenities enjoyed by the future residents and visitors to Hillbilly Hollow. They included a general store for vittles, a brush-shrouded “still house for wines and likkers,” a large, supervised playground and activities cabin for little billies, a lake with paddleboats and motor rentals for when you needed to make a fast water getaway, a miniature golf course for when the city cousins came to visit, a shuffleboard and hoss shoe complex, Ping-Pong and bowling facilities, and an RV campground and mobile-home theme park with hillbilly rides and attractions for the rugrats. A senior citizens cabin community was planned for “when grandmaw and grandpaw need a place to hang their hats,” and a shooting range and gallery were under construction, so that “Bills and Billies could keep their shootin’ eyes sharp against the revenooers.” A smaller sign in the office said that if you required tennis or handball or regular golf or equestrian facilities, Atlanta was ninety miles south thataway.
The Studebaker lady told us that Hillbilly Hollow was already at ninety percent occupancy, and the waiting list stretched into the next year.
“You folks better get your names in the hat right quick,” she said, smiling broadly.
Hillbilly Hollow was the first resort property to be developed by SouthWard of Atlanta.
Over the years, SouthWard prospered, and no one could quite figure out why. All of its properties were themed, and none of them with much more innate taste than Hillbilly Hollow. Soon they covered the inland southeast like kudzu, and became a joke to the developers and residents of newer, more restrained and upscale communities and a near-bottomless source of income to their shameless and canny young developers. They were cheap to build, cheap to buy or rent into, and cheap to maintain for the simple reason that SouthWard did very little of that. After about ten years stories and news reports began to seep out about equipment breakdowns, failed inspections, sewage and gas leaks, pollution of nearby streams and rivers, and lawsuits against the company by residents and neighbors alike. SouthWard invariably settled. There was always a new theme community sprouting somewhere else to pay the freight. SouthWard was flush and fat.
They had never managed to get a toehold on the Southeastern coast, though. Waterfront land was at a premium by the time they looked seaward. Almost all of it was either under development, about to be, or privately owned. In the few instances that they saw a window of opportunity, local consortiums shut them out before they could even make an offer. They had almost resigned themselves to looking to the Texas coast for colonization, which did not suit nearly as well, since Texas itself often seemed to be a theme park and was therefore less receptive to their novelties.
Until now.
Hayes had the grace to redden.
“This is altogether different, Caro,” he said. “For one thing, we’re maintaining design control. For another, they realize they can’t come into this market with anything like their others; Charleston and Lowcountry people would laugh them out of business in a month. This is going to be a new direction for them, a move into serious, substantial resort development, with all the responsible environmental concerns met, the whole ball of wax. Dayclear would give them the kind of dignity they want to project now.…”
He stopped. I did not think even he believed his words. I did not reply. I was trying very hard not to see it: fishnets and plastic crabs and black people dressed in aprons and head kerchiefs and faded overalls, plowing marsh tackies and picking cotton and singing. An RV village where the dense Florida maritime forest, untouched for eons, stood now. Miniature golf on the secret green hummocks.
But Hayes gave it a valiant try.
“If you saw the site plan and the density studies and the environmental proposals, saw that they were mainly Clay’s and his strictest to date, and you had our promise in writing about the settlement and the ponies, would you be willing to take the proposal about Dayclear to the folks there? Just run it past them, see how the wind blows from that quarter? We thought they’d rather hear it from you than one of us. You’re known to them, and they know how you feel about the island.”
“Hayes,” I said slowly, around the nausea and incredulity, “in the first place, what makes you think SouthWard would honor Clay’s plans for two seconds after they owned the property? And in the second place…who is ‘we’? You and who thought they’d rather hear it from me? Does Clay know you’ve told me all this?”
He puffed out his cheeks and blew a gust of air, like a man who must now do something distasteful to him. He looked away toward the dazzling creek, and then back to me, his hands in his pockets.
“There’s something else I came to tell you. I don’t want you to get upset, because it’s all right now, I promise. But…”
“But what? God, Hayes, what?”
“Clay’s in the hospital in San Juan. He had some kind of collapse or something last night; Carter called me early this morning. He wanted me to tell you. But Clay’s okay now…”
He raised his hands toward me as I scrambled to my feet. I could feel the blood running out of my face and hands.
“No, listen, Caro, he really is. Carter’s taking him back to the hotel right about now. They just kept him overnight as a precaution. He’s coming home in the morning. Carter says the doctor thinks it was exhaustion and stress plus maybe a mild heat stroke; apparently he was out all day on a boat, and then spent the late afternoon tramping around the Calista property with that guy who was looking to buy it. In the end the guy nixed the deal. Carter said he offered so low that they told him to eat shit and hit the road. It must have been the last straw for Clay. A decent sale could have changed things. There wasn’t anything wrong with Clay’s heart, though, or anything like that. They did find a duodenal ulcer, though. He’s been asking for that for months; the strain of the business with Calista, and then the enormous stress of trying to get this Dayclear thing up and going…he hasn’t been eating right, and the hours he’s keeping are criminal. He’s traveling way too much, too. Well, you know all that. Maybe now he’ll cut back some and let me take some of the load. I’ve been trying to do it for a long time, but you know Clay.…”
I sank down on the top step, weak and trembling. Clay had always seemed to me simply…invulnerable. Put together from sinew and steel and powered with an inexhaustible energy, driven smoothly on the current of his extraordinary intensity. Clay in the hospital? Clay with an ulcer? What did this say about me?
“Why didn’t someone call me?” I whispered.
“What could you have done? By the time Carter heard from the doctor, Clay was almost ready to leave the hospital. Neither he nor Carter wanted to scare you, and Clay’ll be home before you could get down there. They called me because they didn’t want that motormouth Shawna to get hold of it somehow and blab it to you. Carter says to tell you that if you really want
to do something, pick Clay up at the airport in Charleston tomorrow and take him somewhere nice and relaxing for lunch, and then make him go home and rest for the rest of the day. I told him I’d tell you. And when I couldn’t raise you at the house, I knew I’d find you here.”
“Did Clay ask you to tell me all this, Hayes?” I said, my voice trembling. “Does he want me to take this proposal over to Dayclear?”
Hayes looked at me soberly, and then shook his head.
“No. He doesn’t know I’ve told you about our needing to move things up, and he didn’t ask me to ask you to go over there with it. I took that on myself. It might have been the wrong thing to do, and he’ll probably be pissed as hell at me, but I just couldn’t dump anything more on him right now. And this has got, repeat got, to be done and done soon. You can tell him I told you if you want to. You know better than any of us what he can take and what he can’t.”
“I wonder if I do?” I said so softly that I did not know if he heard me or not. Oh, my poor Clay…
“You really do love him, don’t you?” Hayes said. “Your face looked like you were seeing ghosts.”
“I was,” I said drearily. “Yes, Hayes, I really do love him. I always did. Did you ever doubt it?”
“Then…are you going to tell him I told you?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’ll have to wait and see how he is when I pick him up tomorrow. I’m not going to have him collapsing in the airport or something. You’ll just have to trust my judgment on that. Eventually I will tell him, of course.”
“Eventually I hope you will, or I will,” he said. “It’s just that right now he needs for things to let up a little. It’s a damned shame that the project has got to go forward right away; I wish we did have those three months he promised you. I just thought you might be willing to take some of the load off him by talking to them over at Dayclear.”
“You always did know which of my buttons to push,” I said to him, and he smiled a little.
“I guess I did,” he said. “You don’t try to hide them, do you? Well, will you do that at least? Will you go over there and give them the proposition? If that hurdle could be behind him when he gets back, it would be a bigger help than you know.”
“Hayes, I…yes. Okay. I’ll do that. I may or may not tell Clay you came to me with this, but I’ll go over there and tell them what you propose for the property. I may tell them I hate it, but I’ll wait till they’ve heard the whole thing before I do that.”
“When will you go?”
I shook my head.
“Don’t push me on this. I’ll get to it. I want to think it out first. You know I’m never going to find it acceptable. But it should be up to them, and I’ll leave it like that.”
“Fair enough,” he said, turning to get into the Porsche and go back to his brunch and his Bowl games. “Don’t leave it too long, though, Caro. It wouldn’t do Clay any good at all to lose this offer. Not at all.”
“You let me be the judge of what’s good for Clay, Hayes,” I said, but he had started the big, soft engine and did not hear me. I stood on the porch watching the Porsche race off through the trees, leaving a rooster tail of black mud-mist behind it, thinking it looked like blackness and misery and meanness on four wheels and very glad indeed that it was leaving my part of the island.
When I picked Clay up at the airport in Charleston late the next morning, he looked like a man returning from a funeral, and I hugged him hard and we went to lunch at a crab shack on Edisto and had crab cakes and beer, and then I drove us home and bullied him into taking a nap, and he slept far into that night, and I did not tell him what Hayes had come to ask of me.
Time enough for that.
11
I didn’t tell him for over a week. For the first part of that time I was afraid that he was seriously ill. For the middle part of it he slept. During the last of it he was gone again. By the time I got to him, almost everyone on Peacock’s Island knew what my decision was but my husband.
By that time, everything had changed.
I got him to the doctor the day after he got in. He did not even argue vigorously; he was too subdued for that, and his stomach was hurting him rather a lot. He did not tell me this, but he did voluntarily ask for an antacid. I had never known him to take one before. When he went to get water to wash it down, I called Charlie Porter in Charleston and he worked us in late that afternoon.
Charlie had been at Virginia with Clay and Hayes, and they had remained friends as well as doctor and patients. He had a lucrative practice in the new medical complex over on Calhoun, and he and Hayes played tennis a couple of times a week, or sailed from the Yacht Club. Clay saw him less often, but regularly, usually when he was in Charleston overnight. Charlie and Happy sometimes had him to dinner at their house on Tradd, or he and Charlie went to the club. Charlie was tall, thin, bald, and laid-back to the point of seeming asleep much of the time you were talking to him. But he wasn’t.
“What you need most is a solid month at one of your own resorts,” he said at the end of the day, when he had come with Clay back to the town house on Eliott and was having a drink with us. He stood in front of the fireplace, where I had lit the little fatwood fire that was kept laid there, his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth.
“I don’t feel tired,” Clay said restlessly. “I never did. I just got too hot and got dizzy for a minute. You never got too hot?”
“I never move that fast,” Charlie said affably, and took a swallow of his scotch. “I don’t care how you feel. You don’t know how you feel. That’s your problem. You’ve been running flat out on empty for a long time. You need some rest and I’m not kidding about that. What do you think an ulcer means? What do you think passing out in the middle of a parking lot means? I know about that; Hayes told me. Carter told him. You’re lucky there’s not any permanent damage. Your heart and your blood pressure are basically okay, though I’d like to get the pressure down some. But there are other indicators and you’ve got all of them. God knows what your blood work will show. What are you eating? Are you eating? You say you’re not sleeping very well.…”
“I never slept a lot.…” Clay said, not looking at him.
“You slept more than two or three hours a night or you’d be dead,” Charlie said.
“Can you do anything with him, Stretch?” he said, looking over at me. He has called me that ever since we met. I come about to Charlie’s shoulder when we stand together.
“Nothing short of drugging him,” I said lightly, to mask the concern I felt. I was glad to hear that Clay’s heart was not faulty, but I did not like the sound of the passing out or the insomnia. Not at all. I could not remember a time when Clay had not simply functioned physically like a well-made machine.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Charlie said.
And that’s what we did. Charlie wrote a prescription for Halcion and Zantac, and I went to the big Eckard’s on Calhoun and had them filled. On the way home I looked at the dense little city unrolling outside my windows. It was still balmy and there were people on all the narrow streets in the historic district and around Colonial Lake, strolling or jogging or riding bicycles or in-line skating. The twilight was clear and green, the kind of late winter light that speaks of coming spring and blooming things, and indeed, the big camellia bushes in the gardens of most of the old houses were full to bursting, and whenever I got in and out of the car I caught the breath of the Confederate jasmine that is January’s gift to the Lowcountry. I was caught and pinned with a sudden, overwhelming sense of sheer community, of the presence all around me of my fellow species. It was a benevolent presence, and I did not feel it as a weight but as a lifting.
Could I live here? I thought, turning off Meeting Street onto Tradd. Lights were coming on in the streetside windows. Through the sheer blinds and curtains that people in the shoulder-to-shoulder district South of Broad affect, I could see beautiful rooms swimming with lamp and firelight reflected off polished o
ld wood, and the gleam of silver and china, and the dark chiaroscuro of gilt-framed ancestors on paneled walls.
If the worst happened, like Clay says it might, and we could not live on Peacock’s anymore, could I come and live in the little house on Eliott, and be a part of this?
I could if I still had the island, I thought. But then the image came, of masts and antennas and aerials and putting greens and golf carts, and of the silent pewter creek “redirected” so as to fool me into thinking that there was no water traffic outside my windows. A lump formed in my throat, and when Clay asked if I wanted to stay over at the town house, I said no, that I thought we should go home. I did not think that anything but the dark marshes would cleanse my mind of the pictures there.
When we got home I gave him one of the Halcions and he went to bed in our big bedroom. He was sleeping quietly when I came to bed a couple of hours later. But when I woke up, he was asleep on the little daybed in my sitting room across the hall.
“I got up to get some water and just wandered in there and fell asleep,” he said. But the next morning I awoke and found him there again.
“Okay. Tell me,” I said, when he woke, cramped and stunned, to find me sitting in the wing chair beside him.
“I…Caro, do you dream about Kylie?” he said, and my heart stopped and then jolted forward again. Clay had not spoken of Kylie since before Thanksgiving when he had found me in her room.
“Sometimes,” I said after a while. “I didn’t know you did, though.”
“I never have,” he said, and his face was slack and grayish in the early morning light, and his voice empty. “But for the past two nights I’ve dreamed about her, and they’re…not good dreams. It has something to do with the ocean. It seems louder than it has, or something…it keeps getting into my sleep. I always liked that sound before, but now…Listen, would you care if I slept in here for a while? Just until I get caught up and back to the office?”
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