Low Country (24 page)

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.

Low Country / 209

“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 fascin-

ating, 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 bot-

any. That was in 1957.

“I got married the same year. We do that in

210 / Anne Rivers Siddons

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 com

Low Country / 211

mercial 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 inva-

sion 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.

212 / Anne Rivers Siddons

“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 controver-

sial 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

Low Country / 213

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 landscap-

ing and consulting I can pick up.

“Like I said, I never went back to Cuba. There wasn’t

anything to go back to, really. My parents tried to run

a little shop in Havana, but of course they knew

nothing about that. They

214 / Anne Rivers Siddons

checked out with sleeping pills and rum one night

about the time I discovered booze over here. My wife’s

folks ended up on one of Fidel’s biggest agricultural

cooperatives, doing field labor until they dropped from

it, and my wife worked in the fields, too. I only found

this out later. She never would come out, not even

when I found a fairly safe passage for her and Anita.

Ana always thought things were about to change. Al-

ways did. Anita married a young man from the cooper-

ative and went with him into the mountains to start a

new agricultural colony there, but it failed after the

first year. It’s hard to tell anybody just how bad things

are up in those hills. Everybody was checking out right

and left, but she was nine months pregnant and spot-

ting, and she didn’t want to risk the baby. Her husband

left with the others, saying he’d be back in a day or

two with food and supplies, and after the baby came

they’d go back to Havana and start over. I don’t know

if Anita had any sense or not, but she was Ana’s child

to the core, and she believed him. I don’t know what

happened to him. I guess she didn’t, either. Dead,

probably, from liquor or a fight, a lot of them died

young. Anyway, he didn’t come back and she went

into a long and awful labor alone in their little shack,

and the baby was born dead. She lay there bleeding

to death with Lita beside her. I never even knew I had

a grandchild until after they were all dead but her. She

was not

Low Country / 215

quite five. She wouldn’t leave her mother and the baby.

She just lay down beside them and waited. It was days

before the Red Cross found her. They located my wife

back in Havana and brought Lita to her, and that’s

where she’s been until I could get her out, after Ana

died. She wouldn’t let me bring Lita out before that.

Still waiting for things to get back to normal, she was.

I have no picture of my daughter but the one made at

her christening, and I cannot remember what my wife

looked like, except for a picture I have that was made

on our wedding day. Well, you know the rest of it; I

told you yesterday. So. Does that earn me the right to

hear the story of Caro Venable, from gestation up to

now?”

“One day,” I said, my eyes stinging with tears. “One

day, maybe. My God, what a life. How could mine

compete with that?”

“Are we having a competition? I tell you, Caro

Venable, for all its comings and goings and ins and

outs and so forth, the best thing I can say about my

life up to now is that I beat booze and I have Lita. It

doesn’t seem very much for the amount of energy ex-

pended, does it?”

“If that’s all you think a life like that adds up to,

you’ve got a problem,” I said.

“It was a selfish life,” Luis said briefly. “When all’s

said and done, I did just what I wanted to. Anyway, I

have a feeling things are about to change.”

216 / Anne Rivers Siddons

And he gave me such a showily exaggerated Latin

leer that I could only laugh helplessly. If he had had

a long, waxed mustache, he would have twirled it.

“I have to go home now,” I said. “I’ve hung on

breathlessly to your every word, but now, alas, my

own duties call me.”

“And are you impressed beyond words and moved

almost to tears?”

“I’ll think upon it and let you know,” I said lightly,

but inside I was both those things, and not ashamed

of it, though I would never tell him so.

When he walked me to the car, he said, “Will you

be staying out here? Lita is wild to see the ponies

again.”

“I’ve got to do Thanksgiving for about a million

homeless lambs,” I said, “but I’ll try to come out after

the weekend, and we’ll track them down. How will I

let you know?”

“I’ll know,” he said, bowing from the waist and

kissing my hand. “I assure you, I’ll know.”

I shut the Jeep’s door a little more smartly than was

necessary, and he went back into the store. As he

walked away, I could hear him laughing his hyena’s

laugh. I laughed, too. It felt good.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Jeremy Fowler walked

down to the sea in Puerto Rico at four o’clock in the

morning, sat down, and blew his brains out with a

police .38 nobody knew he had.

Low Country / 217

By noon we had the news on Peacock’s Island. By six

o’clock that evening the company was in deep shock

and full mourning.

Clay and Hayes flew down from Charleston that

afternoon as soon as they could get a plane out. I went

to the office and put a note on the front bulletin board

and told a weeping Shawna to pass the word to

everybody: our house was open for whomever wanted

to come. There would be drinks and some supper, if

anybody wanted it.

Almost everybody came. Most of those who had

expected to go to their respective homes for Thanksgiv-