Low Country (15 page)

too, to this day. It does help. I don’t know why, but

it does.

On this morning, I lay still in the tiny room that had

always been mine, that looked out through a great,

twisted, moss-shawled live oak

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to the marsh proper and the creek, and for a moment

I did not open my eyes. I knew that it must be late

morning or even early afternoon, for I had the

cleansed, heavy-wristed feeling that you get when you

have finally had enough sleep, but there was no sense

of the strong overhead sunlight that should have fallen

on my lids. I opened my eyes and looked out my un-

curtained window into a solid wall of white. Fog. The

dawn conflagration had told it truly: red sky at morn-

ing, sailors take warning. It was odd, though. We

usually get those heavy, solid, still fogs in winter and

very early spring.

I rolled over and stretched luxuriously, feeling each

separate vertebra pop, feeling the long muscles in my

legs pull. I lay still, smelling the peculiar island smell

of damp old percale and salt mud, listening. But I

heard nothing; not the songs of the migratory birds

who often lingered on their way farther south; not the

busy daytime rustle of the small communal wildlife in

the spartina and sweet grass; not the faraway tolling

of the bell buoy off the tip of Edisto; not the low throb

of engines on the inland waterway. Nothing. The fog

had swallowed sound as it had sight. I knew if any

noise did penetrate, it would sound queer and dis-

placed, without resonance. Fog bounces sound about

like a ventriloquist.

I knew that I would take no photographs until it lif-

ted, and toyed with the idea of simply

126 / Anne Rivers Siddons

burrowing back into the old piled, limp pillows and

going back to sleep. But I did not need sleep; I needed

to be out on the island, to let it slip its green fingers

into my mind and draw out the sad silliness of the

night before. Watercolors. That was what this day

called for. Watercolors of the intimate, ghostly body

parts of the island as they emerged from the whiteness

and were swallowed again: a live oak arm with its

sleeve of fog-covered moss, a cypress knee, the bones

of the dock, the red hull of my grandfather’s canoe,

bumping against the rubber tire fender. I thought of

John Marin and his watercolor
Maine Islands
, so much

more powerful and evocative for what it hid in the fog

than what it showed. Yes. A day for vignettes and

glimpses.

I got up and showered in the rusted stall in the

bathroom, letting the brackish, sulfur-kissed water

sluice every knob and crevice of my body. I was, I

thought, one of the few people on earth who liked the

paper-mill stink of the island’s water. I kept big drums

of spring water at the house, both for drinking and

cooking and for washing my hair, as I knew Clay hated

the smell of it after I washed it in island water. Like a

chemistry experiment gone wrong, he said. But I liked

it. Today I would be totally a creature of the island; I

would smell of it and taste of it, as well as see and

touch and hear it.

I put the jeans and sweatshirt back on and

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made coffee and found a rock-hard bagel and zapped

it in the microwave, then took my breakfast to the table

before the long windows that faced the creek. I ate

staring into the shifting wall of the fog. After breakfast

I rooted out my watercolor block and the tin box of

colors, filled a plastic two-liter cola bottle with water,

and started out the sliding door onto the deck. Silence

and wetness smacked me in the face. I stopped and

closed my eyes and breathed it deeply into my lungs.

I heard the hoofbeats while I stood, eyes still closed.

It did not frighten me; I knew that it was the ponies.

They had undoubtedly seen my lights and smelled my

bagel, and were hoping for a handout. The Park Service

maintained them nominally, but the Gullahs in

Dayclear fed them biscuits and corn bread and

whatever they had at hand, and so had my grandfather,

adding grain in the winters, and the ponies had grown

particular. I heard the stamping of hooves and an oc-

casional snort and whicker, and I knew they would be

grouped about the bottom of the steps up to the deck,

waiting to see whether they would dine or would be

forced to bolt. No one on the island mistreated or

shooed them, that I was aware of, but sometimes they

made a great, eye-rolling, hysterical show of fright and

persecution, and went lumbering off in a pod as if

ringmasters with chains were after them. There seemed

to be

128 / Anne Rivers Siddons

no pattern to it. My grandfather always said, when

they spooked and scattered like that, that they were

simply bored, but Clay maintains that their brains are

somehow smaller than those of normal horses, or that

their synapses do not meet, or some such arcane genet-

ic glitchiness. He does not care for the ponies. They

trample grass and gardens and keep the shallow banks

of the creek slick and muddy. And they leave their ex-

crement everywhere.

I inched my way down the steps, talking softly all

the while so that they would know I was there. I finally

saw them when I had almost reached the bottom step.

A small puff of breeze, the little wind off the mainland

that usually comes up in the afternoon, blew aside the

curtain of fog, and there they stood, perhaps seven of

them in a loose knot, staring patiently at the steps

where they knew I would materialize.

I do not know what they looked like originally, but

they mostly look alike now, distinguishing characterist-

ics blunted and buffed away by generations of inbreed-

ing and the years in the subtropical wild. Now they

are almost all a kind of taupish dun color, shaggy of

coat and tangled of mane, with fat, hanging bellies

from the rich marsh grass and the largesse of the is-

landers, and splayed, untrimmed hooves. Their coats

are caked with the dust of their mud wallows in hot

weather, when the slick odorous black mire is an

Low Country / 129

effective fly and mosquito deterrent, and long and

tattered like beggars’ coats in winter. Their heads are

large in proportion to their stumpy legs, and there is

usually some sort of rheumy effluvia stuck in the

corners of their large, feminine brown eyes. They have

long eyelashes, ridiculously like cocottes in a French

farce, and pretty, curly mouths like a fairytale illustra-

tion of an Arabian stallion. They are a very long way

from being handsome creatures, but there is a kind of

tough, cocky competence to them, a chunky briskness,

that pleases the eye. They have attitude. For some

reason, the sight of them always makes me smile.

When the group shifted and I saw emerging from its

middle the little goblin shape of a colt, I laughed aloud.

I had not seen a baby in the herd since I myself was

small.

One of the adults ambled out of the herd and

stretched a stubby neck out toward my hand, and I

opened it so that the sugar cube was visible. Long

yellow piano-key teeth closed over the sugar and raked

it none too daintily into a blacklipped mouth. Pianis-

simo. Nissy. And then the colt came scampering out,

too, and bobbed its head against her flank and looked

around her shoulder at me with huge, black-lashed

eyes, and I both heard and felt my breath come out in

a little puff of wonder and delight.

“Oh, Nissy, you have a baby,” I breathed. “How

pretty he…she?…is. What shall we

130 / Anne Rivers Siddons

call it? Oh, wouldn’t Kylie love this, though!”

I fished in my pocket for more sugar and Nissy came

closer and so did the colt, stretching its miniature neck

out like its mother, ever so slowly, its head actually

trembling with shyness and curiosity, and finally, del-

icately, it took the cube from my palm and crunched

it, then wheeled and galloped away on its long, still-

slender legs. Nissy swung her big head around to watch

it, but she did not follow. The colt disappeared back

into the body of the expectant herd. I threw a handful

of cubes down on the ground and stepped back. Sol-

emnly, not jostling and pushing as dogs or children

would have done, the marsh tackies lipped up the

sugar cubes, crunched them reflectively, waited a while

until no more were forthcoming, and then, as if one

of them had given a signal, wheeled and scampered

clumsily away in one of their mock-panic attacks,

snorting and whickering. The fog swallowed them al-

most immediately, and in another moment swallowed

the sound of them. I was left standing on the bottom

step surrounded by swirling white, with nothing for

company but the memory of them and another memory

that bobbed to the surface of my mind like a cork,

bobbled there tantalizingly for a moment, and then

lay still and whole in my head.

Another day of such fog, long ago, almost the only

time I remembered a fog like this one,

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for we did not come to the island so often in winter.

There was too much going on on Peacock’s for the

children then. But for some reason we were here, Kylie

and I, in a chilly, silent white fog like this one, she

perhaps five or six, still tiny in her yellow slicker,

waiting for my grandfather to finish whatever he was

doing in his bedroom and come and take us crabbing

over on Wassimaw Creek. I would not have taken the

boat out in such weather, but he knew every inch of

all the island’s waterways by heart, and knew that al-

most no one else would have a boat out. It was, he

had said the night before, a fine day for crabbing. So

we waited, and Kylie chafed. I usually let her run free

on the island, but not in fog like this.

Kylie had no fear. You needed a little, sometimes.

The phone rang, and I went into the kitchen to an-

swer it and talked for quite a while to Clay, who was

leaving on a trip to New York and could not find his

cuff links. When I hung up, Kylie was gone.

My grandfather came out then, and together we went

out into the white nothingness, groping our way down

the steps and across the grass to the edge of the marsh,

which dropped a half-foot or so down from the hum-

mock on which the grove and the house sat. Scarcely

six inches, but the difference in terrain was dra

132 / Anne Rivers Siddons

matic. On the high ground, the earth was firm and

level. On the marsh, it was ephemeral, trembling, not

quite solid underfoot. Not precisely watery, or outright

bog, but…not solid. When you could not see, as we

could not on this day, the feeling was eerie, unsettling,

as if you stayed on the surface of the earth only by its

capricious sufferance. We called and called for her,

hearing our voices stop short against a wall of fog,

hearing nothing in return but the dripping from the

old live oaks and the slap of the creek against the dis-

tant pilings of the dock. For the first five minutes or

so I was very angry with her. On the sixth the fear

came. By the time we had groped our way to the edge

of the hundred-foot plank walkway that wound across

the marsh to the creek, I was weak-kneed and nearly

sobbing with fear.

“She can’t have gotten far,” my grandfather said over

and over. “She can’t be in any real trouble. If she’d

fallen or something, we’d hear it.”

“You can’t hear anything in this fog,” I quavered.

“You can’t even hear the fog buoy.…”

“You’d hear if she fell into the water,” he said sens-

ibly. It did no good at all. I was halfway down the

walkway when we did hear a noise. I stopped. It was

the muffled thundering of the ponies coming up over

the hummock from the opposite direction, behind the

house on the high ground. Above it I could hear Kylie’s

laughter. In

Low Country / 133

the distorting fog, it seemed to come from everywhere

around us and from far away, from nearby and

nowhere.

I was back on solid grass by the time the ponies

materialized out of the mist, running hard. One of

them was a good half-head in the lead. It was Pianis-

simo, and Kylie was on her back, bent low over the

thick neck, hands woven into the straggly mane,

clinging like a yellow-clad monkey. Kylie, laughing as

hard and joyously as I have ever heard her laugh in

her life.

While I stood there, speechless with relief and anger,

the pony set her stumpy legs and stopped abruptly,

and Kylie half slid, half fell off her back, still laughing.

By the time I reached her, Pianissimo had lumbered

away, back into the fog with the other ponies. I could

hear them as they trotted along the line of the hum-