Sweetwater Creek (19 page)

She took Emily’s stiff fingers and guided them lightly over the beautiful silver stock engraving. Emily had thought that it would feel cold, but it did not. An almost-living warmth came from it.

Mrs. Foxworth moved Emily’s hand down the barrel. “These are
30
-inch barrels,” she said. “Over/unders. A barrel-maker is an artist in the truest sense of the word. There aren’t many of them. When this gun was made, there were only a few in England. The top two made Purdey barrels.”

Under the withered old fingers, Emily’s fingers felt the satiny steel. It, too, was warm.

Mrs. Foxworth sat back and Emily did too, folding her hands, simply waiting.

“The worth of a near-perfect work of art is entirely in how it is used,” the old woman said. “If it is used with clear purpose and a kind of gratitude, it becomes a very fine thing indeed. Only misused are they in any sense evil. Buddy was as purposeful and courageous a person as I have ever known, even at seventeen, and he used the Purdey exactly as he wished, on his own terms, to best a mortal enemy. And I truly believe that he did that.”

Emily thought of the scrawled line on the bottom of the poem by John Donne that he had left her: “I got him, Emily.” She bowed her head and let the tears come. They, too, were warm and steady and did not choke her. They merely fell. A few of them fell onto the gun in Mrs. Foxworth’s lap. The old lady sat still, simply letting her weep. When Emily finally lifted her head, Mrs. Foxworth said, “Now come on outside with me. It’s time to celebrate my birthday or that lot in the house will be out here like a pack of hounds to see what’s wrong. I’m going to take the first shot. And I want you to take the second. To celebrate Buddy.”

The three of them walked out into the still, moon-flooded garden, old Mrs. Foxworth leaning heavily on her granddaughter. The silence was profound; only the swift, deep song of the river beyond the high bank broke it. No creatures stirred or scuffled; none sang or chirred or bellowed. The stillness of the night seemed a part of the magic of the house and the old woman. Emily was breathing very lightly. There seemed no force in her lungs.

Mrs. Foxworth steadied herself against the stone garden wall and lifted the gun and shot into the empty air out over the river. The noise seemed to roll on and on and on; it would surely not stop until it had lost itself in the Atlantic Ocean, far to the south. Emily had thought the kick of the gun would knock the old woman backward, but she stood erect, braced and still.

“Happy birthday to me,” she said, and handed the gun to Emily. Emily took it, trembling again, deeply frightened. Who knew what she might kill if she shot it into the air? Who knew what the shot would rouse?

“Can you shoot a shotgun, Emily?” Mrs. Foxworth said.

“Yes,” Emily said through stiff lips.

“Then brace yourself like I did, and hold the stock very firmly into your shoulder. Here, let me buffer you a bit with my shawl. And ease the trigger back. Just ease it.”

Emily put the gun to her shoulder as her father had taught her to do when she was eight or so, lifted the barrels into the black air over the river, squeezed her eyes shut.

“Open your eyes,” Buddy said softly. “Don’t close your eyes on anything.”

Emily opened them, saw starlight, and pulled the trigger. The roar deafened her, shook her, broke the world apart. She lowered the gun over her arm and looked at Mrs. Foxworth. The world slid back together as seamlessly as it had been before. Faint and faraway, from the house, came the sounds of cheers.

Mrs. Foxworth put her arm around Emily’s shoulder and let her take the slight weight of her body as they walked back to the house. In the light from the front-door lamps, she smiled at Emily. Lulu, only half comprehending, smiled, too, a tentative smile.

“Courage runs in your family, I see, Emily,” said Mrs. Foxworth. “Now let’s get back in the house before a passle of tackpots show up with champagne. I’ll make us some hot chocolate. How does that sound?”

“It sounds wonderful,” Emily said and began, silently, to cry again.

“Thanks, Emmy,” Buddy said.

AFTER THAT
, Emily felt as though she had just come from the dentist’s, giddy with relief. She sat in the deep embrace of the sofa and talked and talked and talked. She chattered as if someone had wound her up. She knew it was ridiculous but she could not stop the words. She felt her cheeks flush with the silliness of it, but everything that came into her head came out of her mouth in a bubbling flow like a spring. Across from her, in one of the chairs beside the fireplace, Lulu smiled at her in silence. On the other side of the fireplace, in the morris chair, old Mrs. Foxworth simply sat still, smiling faintly, a receptacle, letting Emily fill her up with words.

“This is the best hot chocolate I ever had,” Emily sang gaily. “I bet it’s not that powdered stuff Aunt Jenny buys. It reminds me of Christmas and skiing and things. Only, it’s not even September, is it? I didn’t think about that until now. The fire is just so perfect. And it’s not a bit hot in here. If I lived here I’d have a fire like this every night.”

“Grand does,” Lulu said, licking chocolate off her mouth. “In cool weather it’s just right. In hot weather she just turns the air conditioning up to high and lets it blast. It drives Mother insane, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Grand owns every inch of Maybud, the air conditioning included.”

“I don’t, really,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “I deeded it over to your father when I moved out here, except for this cottage and garden. The only provisions were that he could not sell any part of it and the whole estate would come to you. Maybelle has never forgiven me, but what is a McClellanville Cutler going to say to a Coltrane and a Foxworth? It works out pretty well. Maybud stays in the family, Maybelle gets to be lady of the manor all she wants, and I get the run of the place without having to wait for an invitation. And, best of all, her daughter inherits. So nobody’s going to run her off the place if Rhett goes first, and she can queen it up over there all she likes. She knows I’m not going to pop in. I always did think it was too big and drafty for human beings to live in, and when Bradley died I simply couldn’t stay in the place, so I had the mangy stuffed trophy heads and the photographs of eight generations of gun dogs tossed out of this little house and moved out here. I always loved it, and the river, and all the wild things around, but I couldn’t stand all those dead dogs and antelopes and elk and whatnot staring mournfully down at me. There was even a lion. He was a beautiful thing; I had him sent to the museum. They couldn’t refuse him because we’ve endowed it for generations. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them. And I filled it up with all the books I’d been collecting for years, and all the photographs of people who were dear to me, and all the paintings that I bought for myself and loved, and had a great kitchen put in, and a piazza out back where I sit and catch the breeze when the tide turns, and I feed all the stray dogs and cats and raccoons and possums and skunks in a fifty-mile radius, and nobody can say a word. It was here that I had my private students come. Buddy was one of the first to see this room.”

“I used to spend as much time as I could sneak away from the big house out here,” Lulu said, smiling at her grandmother. “Sometimes I’d tell Mother I was going to play tennis or bridge with somebody, or go into Charleston for lunch, and just come out here and hang out with Grand. She never threw me out. And she taught me some things every proper Charleston debutante ought to know and almost none of them do.”

“Like what?” Emily said. The adrenaline was ebbing, and her eyelids were growing heavy. She looked at the little ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. Almost one o’clock. She felt as if she had been awake and on point like a finely tuned bird dog for longer than she could remember. But she could not bear to lose this magical night.

“Like James Joyce and Henry Miller and the Kama Sutra,” Lulu grinned.

“Oh, Lulu, I did not,” her grandmother said. “Well, maybe some of the Joyce. But it didn’t seem to me that there was much I could teach you in that department, even when you were much younger. You have always had the soul of a courtesan, my dear. Although a very nice one.”

Lulu laughed, a delighted belly laugh, and her grandmother did, too. Emily smiled politely. Buddy had told her about James Joyce, though they had not read from him, but she had no idea who Henry Miller was, or the Kama Sutra. Nevertheless, the laughter that knit them together was an irresistible part of this place, and they were sharing it with her as if she were grown-up, no age at all. The feeling was as heady as wine.

“Who’s Kama Sutra?” she said. “Another one of those courtesans?” She did not know what a courtesan was, but if Lulu’s grandmother thought she had the soul of one, it must be a fine thing. And she liked the rich way it rolled off her tongue.

“It’s a what,” Lulu said. “It teaches you how to be a courtesan and a lot of other things, too. Like…oh, belly dancing. Bumps and grinds…”

“Lulu,” her grandmother said in a warning tone, but Lulu was on her feet, facing them. She kicked off her sandals and tucked her silky white skirts into her bikini underpants and held her arms out, and thrust her pelvis forward, and threw her head back. Her blond hair streamed down her back and her eyes were closed, and she snapped her fingers and moved her hips to inaudible music. She was a different woman entirely from the one who had come to live in Emily’s barn, a woman who threw off sexuality and heat like a kiln. There was absolutely no doubt in Emily’s mind what Lulu was pantomiming, even if she had never seen it and could not, even in her most private moments, imagine it. Now she knew, not only what it looked like but how it felt. A small, hot trembling started up deep in the pit of her stomach. It made her wriggle on her chair and her face and chest flush.

When Lulu began to make soft, breathy sounds and rotate her hips faster and faster, Mrs. Foxworth sat up straight and frowned at her.

“Sit down, for God’s sake, Lulu,” she said. “I never taught you that.”

“No,” Lulu said, dropping back into her chair and smoothing her gilt hair. Her cheeks and chest were flushed, and her breath came fast and shallow. She grinned evilly at her grandmother, and was Lulu again. Emily gave a sigh of relief. That other woman had been taking her to a place she desperately did not want to go.

“You can’t teach it,” Lulu said to Emily. “You don’t learn it. It’s in your hands and your hips and your DNA. Bet you had it, Grand. Bet Emily will, too.”

“No, I won’t,” Emily thought mutinously. “Not ever, not that stuff.”

For some reason it made her think of Kenny Rouse and his scouring eyes, and the day he had touched himself while he stared at her and Lulu. She shivered. All of a sudden she wanted more than anything to go home and climb into bed with Elvis and burrow deep under the covers, even though the night was as hot and still as high summer.

“You must admit, Grand, that I taught you some things, too,” Lulu said to her grandmother.

“My dear, you still do,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “But so far as that stuff goes, I knew it before you were a gleam in anybody’s eye. And, if I may say so, did it a sight better.”

“Grand!” Lulu pretended to be shocked. The old woman and the girl burst into laughter. Emily joined in, hoping hers sounded adult and indulgent, and praying that no one would ask her anything that required an educated answer.

The laughter faded. Old Mrs. Foxworth looked at Emily thoughtfully.

“Buddy left me a book to give you, just before he stopped coming here. He said, ‘What would be a good age for a girl to start reading poetry?’ And I said, ‘Almost any time. But about twelve would be good to have a whole book of poetry of her own.’ And he asked me what I thought you would like most, and I said I thought you would like Yeats, because he’d been reading bits of it to you, and you seemed to respond to it. So we picked out a collected works and he wrote a little message in it for you and asked me to give it to you if for some reason he wasn’t able to. I still have it. I’ll give it to you before you go.”

“I don’t want it,” Emily said fiercely. “I’m not going to read it.”

“That’s up to you,” said Mrs. Foxworth. “But you’re going to take it with you when you leave tonight. I promised him.”

Emily felt the stinging in her throat move up behind her eyes. It was all too much. A whole world of Buddy’s that she had known nothing about had been given her. She did not know how to receive it. She wanted desperately not to know about it. The world she had shared with him had been world enough.

A quick, light knocking tattooed the door. It was unmistakably feminine, almost flirtatious, and the three in the cottage fell silent.

“Oh, shit, it’s Mother,” Lulu whispered. “Grand, I really can
not
do this right now. She’ll be on me like a duck on a June bug, and if I have to do this when-are-you-coming-home dance again, I’ll wring her neck. I will.”

Her grandmother looked at her for a moment and nodded.

“Just keep quiet,” she said. “She doesn’t come in if I don’t invite her.”

Looking from one of them to the other, Emily fell silent, too. An odd sense of itching unease began in her stomach.

“What is it, Maybelle?” Mrs. Foxworth called in an exaggerated polite voice.

“I just wanted to say happy birthday, Mama F,” Maybelle Foxworth trilled. “Everybody missed you. And I need to see Lulu for a sec. Just a tiny sec. Can I come in?”

Lulu screwed her eyes shut and shook her head so violently that her hair whipped her face. She looked now like a beautiful child in a tantrum, not the hip-rolling Siren she had been a few moments ago. On the whole, Emily liked the tantrum better.

Mrs. Foxworth nodded at her granddaughter again and called out, “And what makes you think Lulu is here, Maybelle? For goodness sake, it’s after one. I was headed for bed.”

“Well, I heard her voice, of course. Don’t you think I know my own child’s voice? Listen, I have a wonderful surprise for her. Lulu, can you hear me? A surprise all the way from Charlottesville, Virginia. Now isn’t that nice?”

Lulu made a small, strangled sound and they looked at her. She stood absolutely still, as if stricken to stone. Her face was blank and paper-white; even her lips were bleached, and her breath came so fast and shallow that she sounded to Emily like a small animal that one of the dogs held at bay, perhaps a rabbit. Her blue eyes were unfocused and as dead as a winter root. Mrs. Foxworth stared at her, and, without turning, called out to the woman pecking at the door. “You heard that idiot Conan O’Brien’s voice and nobody else’s, Maybelle,” she said sharply, without moving her eyes from her granddaughter’s blanched face.

“Then just let me pop in and say happy birthday…”

“You just pop back to the house and take your surprise with you,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “I’m not dressed and I’m going to bed.”

“I really need to talk to her, Mama F…”

“So call her tomorrow at the farm. Go home, Maybelle. I’ll come over tomorrow if it’s so important, and you can tell me.”

“Mama F—”

“GO HOME!” Mrs. Foxworth snapped in a tone that Emily would not have disobeyed if her life depended on it. She doubted that many people would. There was an indistinct murmur of voices outside, one fretful and one slow and deep, and finally the sound of footsteps on the rolling stones of the path, going away.

Mrs. Foxworth opened the heavy drapes an inch and peered out. Then she turned to Lulu, who still had not moved or spoken. She was even whiter, and Emily could not see her breathing.

“You can go out the kitchen door and back down the path from there,” Mrs. Foxworth said. “Your mother surely is not going to risk her Blahniks out there. Lulu, what on earth is going on? Is there someone with your mother?”

Lulu’s eyes flew open then, and Emily saw the breath start in her chest with an almost audible thump. Her eyes were white-ringed, wild with terror. Emily stood frozen. If there was something abroad in the thick, still night that inspired that sort of terror in Lulu, she did not think she could put a foot outside.

“Grand, I can’t…” Lulu whispered.

“All right, baby. You all go on now. I’ll wait and head her off if she comes back. But Lulu, if it’s all this bad, you need to tell me. You know I’ve always looked out for you. You know I can handle your mother…”

“You can’t help me with this, Grand,” Lulu said, in a tiny voice that was almost a wheeze. “Nobody can but me. And I’m handling it. Or I was, until Mother stuck her nose into it.”

The old woman stared at her granddaughter again for a long moment, in the shadowless white kitchen light. Then she limped over and kissed them both on the cheek, Lulu first, and then Emily.

“Then go on. But I’m always home, and I
can
help, no matter what you think. You call me tomorrow.”

She moved to the kitchen door and held it open. Outside, the damp, hot, river-breathing darkness had swallowed the world. The moon was down. A cloud of iridescent moths bumbling at the dim yellow porch light was the only life Emily could feel in all that vast space of water and earth and sky. Still, Lulu did not move, and presently, her grandmother pushed her very gently out into the night. Emily hung back. She did not want to go out into that consuming, secret-hiding blackness. More than anything in the world, she did not want to do that. There was no one now who could protect her.

“Take care of her, Emily,” Mrs. Foxworth said to her softly. “She’s by no means as cool a cookie as she thinks she is. Call me if this business keeps up. Call me anyway. It’s in the book under B. Foxworth Sr.”

She took Emily’s cold hands in her own. Hers were as fragile as bird’s bones, but surprisingly strong and warm. Emily felt competence flood back. I am in charge now, she thought. Lulu has to do what I say.

She nodded and took Lulu’s cold hands and moved her out of the circle of light and onto the dark path.

“Oh, wait, your book,” Mrs. Foxworth called from behind her.

“I don’t want it!” Emily called back. Anxiety came flooding back. She had taken in and absorbed a strange and luminous old woman, and the familiar Lulu Foxworth in two violently different and unimaginable new personas. She did not think she could bear to have to see Buddy in a new light. Something that she could cling to had to remain unchanged.