Low Country (16 page)

mock toward the distant maritime forest that often

sheltered them, but I could no longer see them.

Kylie was properly chastened when my grandfather

and I finished with her, but she was not repentant. She

had, she said, seen the herd off at the edge of the copse

while I talked on the phone and went to give them

sugar, and they were so friendly, especially Pianissimo,

that she just wanted to see if she could ride. Nissy, she

said, had stood like a statue while she climbed onto

her back, but then had taken off as if she had heard a

shot.

134 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“I rode her all the way down the old deer path,

Mama,” she said. “She can run like the wind, for a fat

little old pony. It was…it was neat. Just me and her

and the fog…and you could hear the others behind us.

It was like we were leading them on a charge.”

“Didn’t you hear us calling you?” I said.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “I did.”

“Kylie, you know you have to come when I call you.

That’s not negotiable. You agreed to that. How can I

let you out of my sight if you don’t keep your word

about that?”

“I was, Mama,” she said. “I was coming faster this

way than if I was on my own two legs. Lots faster.”

She was right, technically, but I was not prepared

to argue the point. I cut our visit short and we forwent

the crabbing expedition and went back home to Pea-

cock’s. She was disappointed, but she did not whine

or cry. If Kylie deliberately disobeyed me, or did

something she knew I would not have permitted, she

took the consequences without a murmur. She simply

fell in love with an idea, weighed the pleasure against

the cost, did the deed with relish, and paid the price

uncomplainingly. It was a very adult way to live a

young life, all told. Except that the final price had been

more than she could have imagined. More than I could

have, too.

I stood still on this morning, in the fog, think

Low Country / 135

ing of that day, hearing again the thudding of the

hooves of the herd, seeing again the flash of my

daughter’s yellow slicker in the cottony nothingness.

Fog and ponies and Kylie…

Before I went out with my watercolors I called Clay

at his office. Shawna, the office’s forty-year-old recep-

tionist who has never married and thinks that she is

married to Clay, said that he was out of the office until

after lunch. She did not know where he had gone, but

she had an idea it was into Charleston.

“I hope he’s seeing a doctor finally, Mrs. Venable,”

she said in the honeyed twang that puts my teeth on

edge. Shawna is originally from New Jersey. The

Lowcountry got her about the same time Clay did. She

sounds as if she is chewing cape jessamine.

“What on earth for?” I said, surprised and faintly

alarmed.

She was silent a moment, and then she said, “Well,

nothing, really, I guess. It’s just that none of us think

he’s been himself lately. You know, he’s just so distrac-

ted, and abrupt, and it’s as though he doesn’t really

see you when you talk to him.…We just thought he

ought to get a checkup. But of course if you haven’t

noticed anything, then there’s nothing.…” She let her

voice trail off. My own blindness and neglect were

implicit in the dying syllables.

“I think he’s just fine, Shawna,” I said briskly.

136 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“But thank you for worrying about him. If there’s

anything amiss, I’m sure he’ll let us know. We had a

pretty late night last night, with the new people coming

in and all.…”

“Of course,” she said. “He’s just tired. I keep telling

him he ought to let somebody else take over those

dinner things for the new people, but you know how

he is.…”

“Yes, I do,” I said, and thanked her and hung up

smartly.

Did I, though? Had Clay really been all those

things—distant, abstracted, tired, unseeing—and I had

not noticed? I thought back. He had been working

very late in his home office for the past month or so,

but he frequently did that when there was a new project

in the wings. And he had been silent and gone away

behind his
Wall Street Journal
or his clipboard in the

mornings at breakfast, and to some extent at dinner,

but when wasn’t he? Clay was not gregarious, not lo-

quacious, not a mealtime gossip. He never had been,

especially not since the Plantation companies had taken

off like they had in the past four or five years, with

new properties coming on line in half a dozen states

and the Caribbean. Not since Kylie.

Both of us had been, to some extent, gone away

since then. I had been content to have it so. I could

not have borne the weight of a hovering, demanding

relationship in those first few precari

Low Country / 137

ous months and years. I did not think he could have,

either. It was as if we had had an agreement: when the

time is right, when the healing is further along, we will

come all the way back to each other. We will know

when. There is no hurry.

But there had been no agreement. I had just assumed

he felt as I did. I shook my head and went on out into

the day. I would call again after lunch, and tonight at

dinner we would talk about it. Finally, we would talk.

I could not abide the thought that he was unhappy

and alone with it.

The fog lifted about noon, and the sun fell so heavily

on the windless marsh and creek that I was soon hot

and sweat-slicked, and shucked my jacket and tied it

around my waist. With the fog gone, my morning’s

pursuit of fog-sculpted vignettes vanished, too, and the

glare off the water began to give me a headache. I

trudged back to the house and put on a T-shirt, ex-

changed the watercolors for my camera, made myself

a peanut butter sandwich, and took everything out to

the Boston Whaler that bobbed at the dock. We had

not yet put it away for the winter; there had been no

real winter on the island, and there probably would

be none. I could remember days in January and Febru-

ary out on the water, with the sun burning face and

forearms and only a chill edge to the wind to remind

you that the soft Lowcountry winter had teeth and

138 / Anne Rivers Siddons

could bare them if it chose. But it rarely did. Only oc-

casionally did we get a slicking of sleet or ice, and only

once in my lifetime did snow fall on Peacock’s and the

island. But it had been a spectacular snow, drifting up

to eight or nine inches and lingering for three or four

days. Snow on palms and Spanish moss…everyone

had taken photos of it, to send to family and friends

off-island.

I took the boat down Alligator Alley to Wassimaw

Creek and over to the inland waterway, to photograph

the steel winter light there. But the sky was too milky

for much contrast, and there was a softening in the

distance that spoke of returning fog. So I cut the motor

and threw out the little anchor and let the Whaler drift.

I ate my sandwich and drank the Diet Coke I had

brought along, and then I stretched out on the backseat

and pulled the Atlanta Braves cap that belonged to

everyone and no one over my eyes and drowsed. There

must have been virtually no traffic on the waterway; I

saw none, and heard none, for the entire time that I

was there. But for much of that time I was fast asleep,

and when I woke, the fog was just reaching its suc-

cubus’s fingers out to pat my face, and the heat was

gone from the day. A solid white bank lay over the

Inland Waterway, and I knew that it would drift up

the creeks and estuaries until it swallowed the entire

island. I pulled up the anchor and started the engine

and

Low Country / 139

putted for home. I was not worried about the fog, but

I was cold in just the T-shirt, and I had a neck ache

from sleeping with my head tilted forward against the

stern. I wanted hot coffee and a shower before I left

for Peacock’s. More than that, I wanted not to leave

for Peacock’s at all. The island had done its work while

I slept, and I felt washed and lightened and eased.

There would undoubtedly be some sort of additional

welcome ceremonies for the new people this evening,

and I simply did not feel like wasting this beneficence

on them.

“Please let them all have previous engagements,” I

whispered to the whitened sky, though what engage-

ments they might have there among the alien corn I

could not imagine. But when I got back to the house

the answering machine light was blinking, and I picked

it up to hear Clay’s voice telling me that he and Hayes

had to go to Atlanta on the spur of the moment and

that the human resources people were baby-sitting the

newcomers tonight.

“So stay another day or so, if you want to,” he said.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be. There are some

money people who made some time for us earlier than

we thought. I’ll call you either there or at home when

I know where we’re staying and when we’ll be back.

Or I’ll let Shawna know. Take care.”

He did not say, “I love you,” as he sometimes

140 / Anne Rivers Siddons

did. He was using his flat, intense, strictly business

voice. He did not use it for endearments. I would not

have had it so. I thought that the money people must

be pretty important. My heart lifted. I could stay on

the island. Clay would not miss me in this mood.

I had my shower and built a fire and put on a tape

of Erroll Garner’s
Concert by the Sea
. It was an old re-

cording; it had been my grandfather’s. Oddly, he had

loved the cool, improvisational West Coast jazz of the

late fifties and sixties, and I had transferred a lot of his

old records to tape for him. I loved this one, too. Per-

fect fog music. I made a pot of coffee and rooted

around in the bookcase among the yellowing, damp-

warped books and magazines for something I had not

read recently. I settled on
Kon-Tiki
, another favorite of

my grandfather’s, and curled up on the spavined sofa

to lose myself at sea.

An hour or so must have passed when I heard the

ponies again. The fog-flattened sound of their hooves

pulled me back from the wastes of the Pacific, and I

shook my head for a moment, not quite knowing where

I was. Then I smiled and got up and went out onto

the deck to see if I could spot Pianissimo and her colt

again.

The fog was blowing, spinning fast in the circle of

yellow light from the overhead porch light. A brisk

wind from off the ocean meant that it would be clear

later tonight, and there would be

Low Country / 141

a sky pricked full of icy stars. In the swirling skeins I

caught glimpses of the herd, moving restlessly around

the support posts of the house. It was not full dark,

but it would be in fifteen or twenty more minutes.

I went back for sugar cubes and then walked slowly

down the steps, clicking my tongue.

“You here, Nissy?” I called softly. “Want some sug-

ar? Come on, bring that baby up here and let’s have

a look at him. Or her.”

A dark shape came out of the fog: Nissy, sure

enough, with the colt close on her flank. I stretched

out my hand with the sugar cube, and that’s when I

saw the child.

She stood off at the edge of the pale orb of porch

light, perhaps thirty feet away, still as a statue, staring

at me. Her head and shoulders were fairly distinct, but

from her waist down she was lost in fog. I got the im-

pression of a small brown face and great dark eyes that

fastened intently on me, and a headful of dark curls

with fog droplets clinging to them. She wore a yellow

rain slicker. She looked to be about five or six, maybe

seven. A small seven. She made no noise at all, and

she did not move.

I did not, either. I could not have. My heart began

to thunder, pounding so hard that I could hear only

it and my blood, roaring in my ears. If she had spoken,

I could not have heard her. But she did not speak. My

knees and thighs and

142 / Anne Rivers Siddons

wrists turned to water. It seemed to me that only the

powerful heartbeat held me up, that I hung from it like

a marionette.

Nissy whickered and stamped her hoof, and I held

out my hand toward the child as slowly as if to a wild

creature.

“Who are you?” I meant to say.

“Is it you?” came out of my mouth, a crippled whis-

per.

The child turned and bolted. The fog took her before

she had gone four paces. I could hear her footsteps for

a bit before they were lost in the cottony whiteness. I

thought she ran back around the house and toward

the dirt road leading into the hummock where the

house stood.

I could not make my legs go after her. In the space