Low Country (6 page)

tiently so that it will not hang in her eyes. Her skin is

permanently the red-brown of old cordovan shoes,

from the sun. Her voice is nasal and flat, her eyes are

the faded blue of old denim, and her hands are the size

and shape of coal scuttles. She is also an artist of

stunning originality and talent. Her enormous, flaming

primitive oils hang in galleries and museums all up

and down the East Coast. Her strange, soaring iron

sculptures are in collections all over America. She gets

upwards of fifteen thousand dollars for her small

paintings and I don’t even know how much for the

larger ones. She works so slowly that she rarely does

more than three or four pieces a year, will not accept

commissions, and still lives in the ramshackle former

filling sta

Low Country / 43

tion that she moved into thirty years ago, on an undis-

tinguished two-lane blacktop road that threads the

middle of the island. My grandfather, who was in-

trigued with her gift and her grit, rented it to her some

years before he deeded the island to Clay and stipulated

that she be allowed to live there as long as she liked.

Clay thinks that she was more to my grandfather than

tenant, though she was only twenty when she first

came to the island, and he may be right. Lottie sleeps

with whomever she pleases and does not try to conceal

the fact, though with no one from the Plantation, that

I know of. Her gentlemen callers all seem to be from

off-island, to judge from the tags on their automobiles.

She built her studio herself, from random ends of

lumber, and it looks like a chicken house on the outside

and is glorious inside with light and space. When I

asked her, when we first met, why she chose Peacock’s

Island, she said, “The light,” and I knew what she

meant. I soon found that I usually did, about

everything. She is my best friend. Clay cannot stand

her, nor she him. Both of them have finally worked

around to a point where they simply do not discuss

the other anymore.

But there are other ways of showing enmity, and

Lottie’s disgusted snorts and Clay’s still, cold silences

get their messages across. I know he thinks she is

sluttish, slovenly, an eyesore in Eden, and worst of all

in his primer of sins, lazy. He is

44 / Anne Rivers Siddons

probably right on all counts. She thinks he is cold,

calculating, far fonder of money than me, and worst

of all in her primer, a despoiler of the wild. I never

thought of Clay as any of those things, not the Clay I

met and fell in love with and married. But so many of

the things I never thought have come about, and so

many that I did think have failed to do so, that I

sometimes trust my own judgment last after anyone

else’s. It’s easier to think Lottie is wrong about Clay,

though I have to admit that she has seldom been about

other things.

But we all have our blind spots, don’t we? Oh, yes,

we do. And I figure Clay is hers. Just as he is mine.

Lord, the day I first met him! He will never seem

more beautiful, more whole, more hypnotically

charming than he did on the day his friend Hayes

Howland brought him over to the island to meet my

grandfather. Poor Clay; he would hate that if I told

him, hate that in my mind, he reached his ascendancy

before I even knew him well. But I never have told

him, and I never will.

It was in July, just at dusk. It had been a strange,

unsettled day of running cloud shadow; little winds

that started up and doubled back upon themselves and

then died; sudden warm, hard spatters of rain that left

the earth and air steaming and shimmering. Later we

would surely have a storm. I was visiting from Colum-

bia,

Low Country / 45

where we had just moved, and had brought my water-

colors and easel with me and was sitting on the dock

at the end of the long, dilapidated wooden walkway

that led from the marsh house to the tidal creek, where

my grandfather kept his Boston Whaler and his canoe,

trying to catch the spectral light. I was between my

freshman and sophomore years at Converse, just tast-

ing my gift. The dazzle to the west, where the sun hung

red, preparing to flame and die behind the long sweep

of emerald marsh, was overwhelming; I could not look

into it without shading my eyes.

I heard them before I saw them, heard the slow putt-

putt of an outboard lost somewhere in the rose-gold

dazzle, and turned to look toward it, squinting. The

boat came out of the light, its engine silent, and loomed

up almost at the dock where I sat. It bumped the rub-

ber fender and wallowed to rest. Hayes got out first;

I knew him slightly, from other visits he had made to

my grandfather during my own summer stays, but I

stared anyway. He was resplendent in a white linen

suit, with the light gilding his red head, and looked far

better in both than he usually did. Hayes is substantial

and sometimes engaging, but he is not handsome.

“Hi, Caro,” he said. “I’ve brought y’all a visitor.”

“Hi, Hayes,” I said back. “That’s nice.”

A tall young man got out behind him. He

46 / Anne Rivers Siddons

wore white linen also, but you noticed the man and

not the suit, instead of just the opposite, as with Hayes;

it might have been his everyday garb, it seemed so

right and easy on his long body. A white linen suit in

an Edwardian cut, and white buck shoes. He had a

great, flowing blue satin tie. It should have looked

foppish but did not. The light made an old-gold helmet

of his hair and slanted into his eyes so that they flamed

out of his narrow, tanned face, an impossible, firestruck

blue. He smiled and the spindrift light glanced on white

teeth. He had a flower in his buttonhole, a small, tight,

old-fashioned pink sweetheart rose, and in his long,

brown hands he held a bouquet of them.

“This is Clay Venable,” Hayes said. “We roomed

together a couple of years at Virginia. He’s been a fool

over the Lowcountry since the first time I brought him

home with me, and I’ve finally talked him into moving

to Charleston. He wanted to see some real, unspoiled

marshland and I thought of your granddaddy’s place

right off the bat. I guess you can’t get much more un-

spoiled than Peacock’s. This is Caroline Aubrey, Clay.

Mr. Aubrey’s granddaughter. Did I tell you she was

an
artiste
as well as a beauty?”

“Miss Aubrey,” Clay Venable said, holding the bou-

quet out to me. “I thought you might like these. We’ve

been at a fancy garden party in Charleston and I stole

them off a bush on the way

Low Country / 47

out. Better take them before my hostess comes after

me in a motorboat.”

“Her gardener, you mean,” Hayes said lazily. “In a

cigarette boat. We’ve been at Marguerite MacMillan’s,

Caro. I thought if Clay was going to be a Lowcountry

boy he might as well start out in the virtual holy of

holies. Little did I know he’d be filching roses out of

her garden before the afternoon was over. Can’t take

him anywhere.”

I put out my hands and took the roses, but I did not

speak. I could not seem to look away from this tall,

radiant being clothed in white and molten rose-gold

light. I remember thinking that his voice did not really

sound Southern; it was deep and soft and slow, but

somehow crisp. There was something else about him

that did not seem native, either, though I could not

have said what it was then, and still cannot. Clay was

born on a farm in Indiana, but by that time he had so

submerged himself into the fabric of the Lowcountry

that there were few traces of the rural Indiana scholar-

ship boy left, and of course by now there are none at

all. Clay is more a denizen of this coast now than

someone generations born to it.

“You gon’ ask us in, Caro?” Hayes said, and my face

flamed at the amusement in his voice.

“Yes. Please come on up to the house. Granddaddy’s

having his sundowner. He’ll love some

48 / Anne Rivers Siddons

company. He’s always saying he’ll never make a

drinker out of me. Well, not that he’d really want to,

of course…thank you,” I said, remembering the roses,

and caught my platform heel in a crack of the dock,

and lurched to one knee. The roses sailed over the

weathered cypress railing and disappeared into the sea

of reeds and black water.

There was a small silence, and then Clay Venable

said, “A simple ‘no thank you’ would have sufficed.”

I froze in mortification, and then the amusement

under his words penetrated my fog of misery, and I

began to laugh. He laughed, too, and helped me to

my feet, and Hayes laughed, and after that it was all

right. By the time he had been introduced to my

grandfather and the bourbon had been poured, and

we sat on the screened porch looking out over the sil-

vering marsh, Clay Venable was as much one of us as

Hayes or any of the other young men from Charleston

and the islands that my grandfather was accustomed

to greeting when he encountered them hunting or

fishing or canoeing on the wild tidal creeks and inlets

of Peacock’s Island. It was common knowledge that

the island belonged to my grandfather, but it was also

common knowledge that he did not mind the occasion-

al sporting visitor, so long as they did not disturb the

pristine tranquillity of the marsh and woods. Indeed,

he had known most

Low Country / 49

of them since they were small boys and came to Pea-

cock’s with their fathers.

Dark fell, the sudden thick, furry blackness of the

Lowcountry marshes, unpricked by any lights at all

except the kerosene lantern that sat on a table on the

porch and the citronella candles I had lit. The house

had electricity, but my grandfather disliked it, and often

went days without lighting an electric lamp. He had

no such qualms about other appliances, and happily

used his small, battered refrigerator and the old stove

and even the jerry-rigged washer and dryer that sat on

the other end of the porch. But he loved lamplight,

and it is what I use mostly when I am at the house

even to this day. I find that it calls him back to me as

little else does.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about:

Hayes’s job at one of the ubiquitous law firms on

Broad Street, I think, and how restless he felt there,

closed away from the beaches and marshes and rivers

and creeks where so many Charleston boys spent great

chunks of their boyhood. My studies at Converse, and

the painting that I was doing on the island that sum-

mer. The herd of wild ponies that had chomped and

stomped its stolid way around the back part of the is-

land since I could remember. The monster bull gator

my grandfather had seen the day before, and the pan-

ther that he swore he had heard scream in the deep

blacknesses of several

50 / Anne Rivers Siddons

past nights. The drought that was decimating the coast

that summer and how badly my grandfather’s year-

round property in McClellanville was suffering from

it. I did not think he was unduly upset about the

drought in McClellanville; since my grandmother had

died several years before, he had spent more and more

of his time at the marsh house, and left it now largely

to look after his banking business in Charleston, or to

make a run to a hardware or grocery store. He had

even, the winter before, put in a big cast-iron stove in

the bedroom where he slept, so that, with the huge

stone fireplace in the living area, the house was habit-

able through the brief, icy spasms of the Lowcountry

winter.

“Don’t you get lonesome out here?” I asked him

once.

“No,” he had said in honest surprise. “Why would

I? Everywhere you look something alive is slapping

the water or shiverin’ the bushes. And when you run

out of the live ones, there’s plenty of not-so-live ones,

let me tell you. Many’s the night I’ve passed in the

company of somebody who left these parts a hundred,

two hundred years ago.”

I knew that he was teasing me, but only with the

top part of my mind. The old, bottom part nodded

sagely: Yes. I can see that that’s so. I have always felt

that there were many levels of beings on Peacock’s Is-

land, many more souls than cur

Low Country / 51

rently wear flesh. It is not, on the main, a bad feeling

at all.

Finally, that night, we got around to Clay Venable.

I knew that my grandfather was as curious about him

as I was, but his natural, grave good manners decreed

that he make Clay feel at home before asking him to

share much of himself.

“I don’t think you’re native to these parts, but you

seem to have taken to them right well,” he said mildly