Sweetwater Creek (27 page)

“This is just a little something,” Lulu said, when Emily thanked her, caressing the little unicorn. Under her fingers it felt cool and alive. “You’ll get your big present on your birthday.”

On the day before New Year’s Eve the weather finally broke. A frigid wind roared in from beyond the marshes and lashed the spartina into cold, rolling dun-colored waves. Ice rimmed the edges of Sweetwater Creek and threw up spikes in the mud and crackled in the dogs’ watering troughs. The creek and river darkened. Out on the hummocks the palmetto fronds clattered. Walter suspended training. Emily and Lulu were distressed at the crushing wave of cold, but Walter and the boys were jubilant.

“Means there’ll be ducks,” Walter said. “Haven’t seen a one on the river this year. They need the cold to force them down to feed. This should bring in plenty of them.”

Wrapping herself in her down jacket and muffler for the dash from the house to the barn, Emily felt a shiver of pity and fear: the poor ducks. Dropping gratefully down onto smooth, hidden water to feed after a night’s flying against the vicious ocean wind, and meeting, not duckweed but guns and dogs and death.

“I’m so glad I never let you hunt,” she said to Elvis, as she slid into her bed that night. Beside her, he groaned happily and dug into her neck with his nose.

That night Emily dreamed that she stood on the drawbridge over the moat, looking out into darkness on the other side. Far away, down the dirt road that led to the highway, the little woodland tree glowed like a candle in the cold, moonless dark. Around it the animals of the Lowcountry stood as if in a tableaux. In their midst, Buddy stood, erect and whole and gleaming blond, like a gold-leaf statue. He smiled at her, but did not come to meet her at the far edge of the drawbridge.

“Come over here,” Emily called, joy rising like a tide in her throat. “I know you can.”

“No,” he said. “I need to be over here right now.”

“Well, then, will you help me come over there? I can’t cross this drawbridge by myself.”

“I can’t do that, either,” he said. “It’s not allowed.”

“When, then? I need to talk to you,” Emily whispered, the joy thickening into tears. “I’ve tried and tried. Why won’t you answer me?”

“I have been,” he said, his voice, like the rest of him, golden and shimmering. “You haven’t been hearing me.”

“I’ll listen harder…”

“It won’t make any difference. Your ears are all stopped up. When you’re really ready to hear me, you will.”

“When will that be?” The tears slid down her cheeks.

“I don’t know. Maybe never. I’ll keep trying, though.”

Darkness fell like a curtain on the road, and Buddy and the tree and the animals were gone. Emily woke in the dark of her room in the barn, sobbing aloud. Elvis was licking her face.

“Did you see him?” she whispered.

“I always do.”

“Have you been crying?” Lulu said the next morning when she came downstairs to join Emily.

“No.”

Late that afternoon they stood before the old cheval glass mirror in Lulu’s room, finishing dressing. Besides the lamps, Lulu had lit candles, and in the wavy speckled old mirror she and Emily both looked like women out of an earlier time, in their long-sleeved velvet dresses, with their hair, copper and blond, piled on their heads. Lulu fastened her grandmother’s pearls around her neck and then turned and studied Emily. She reached into a bureau drawer and took out a little twist of tissue paper and handed it to Emily.

“I was going to wait until your birthday proper, but you need these tonight,” she said.

Emily opened the twist. In the folds a pair of earrings lay, green and water-clear stones gleaming in mountings of old rose gold. Emily gasped and looked up at Lulu.

“Are they…?”

“Emeralds and diamonds. They were Grand’s grandmother’s. She gave them to me on my eighteenth birthday, but I’ve never worn them and I never will. I hate emeralds.”

“Why?”

“I read someplace they were bad luck,” Lulu said. “I don’t need any more of that.”

“Does that mean I’ll have it?” Emily said, turning her head this way and that to watch the teardrops swing and glitter against her bare neck.

“Not a chance. Nothing ahead for you but good luck. Anyway, I think they’re only bad luck for blondes. Look at us, will you? Velvet and pearls and emeralds and candlelight. John Singer Sargent might have painted us.”

Emily hugged Lulu fiercely, feeling her sharp bird’s bones under the velvet, and smelling silky-clean hair and the old-fashioned scent of tuberoses.

“I’ll wear them always,” she whispered into Lulu’s neck.

“Not exactly the thing for the puppy ring,” Lulu said, and Emily felt her smile against her cheek. “They look stunning on you, though, as if they had been made for you. Now aren’t you glad I made you get your ears pierced last fall? We’ll have a proper birthday party tomorrow, when everybody’s off on the hunt, with cake and confetti and balloons and dogs—the works. Twelve to thirteen is the biggest step there is.”

“Why?” Emily said.

“Because thirteen is when you start to know things.”

“What things?”

“Just things. Things about the world and people and yourself. About life. Things you’ll need to know the rest of your life but that nobody will tell a child.”

“Bad things?”

“Good and bad. Strange. Wonderful. Scary. Beautiful. Sometimes things you hate but can never un-know. And some things so glorious that only a complex and aware mind can comprehend. Thirteen is when you start getting complicated, Emily.”

“I don’t know if I want to know them then.”

“You don’t have any choice. But it all comes gradually. Nobody could stand knowing everything at once.”

They went down the barn stairs and out into the grassy field around the dog ring. It was still early; an apocalyptic red sun was bloodying the marshes to the west, but in the east, high in the purpling arc of the sky, a great ghost moon hung, waiting to bloom into light.

“Wolf moon,” Lulu said. “It’ll be cold and clear as crystal in the morning, great for the hunt.”

In her thin raincoat, Emily shivered. It was not just the stinging cold. Moon of the wolf….

They were going to the big house early so that Lulu could show Emily where everything for the party was and what to do about it.

“Why do I need to know that?” Emily had grumped. “You’re going to be there. It’s your party.”

“No, it’s not,” Lulu said firmly. “It’s your father’s party, and that means it’s yours, too. You’re the lady of the house, Emily, like it or not. And the lady of the house is always the gentleman’s hostess. Always. I can help plan it, but you have to know the entire drill.”

“Those men know what to do. They go to things like this all the time. They can look after themselves. All those servants of yours know what to do. They can look after everybody. The only people who don’t know are Daddy and me.”

“Well, after tonight you will,” Lulu said in exasperation. “Emily, if you’re going to be part of this farm’s future, or run it one day, you’re going to be the hostess of Sweetwater. And you won’t be entertaining folks from the VFW and the John’s Island Lanes. This farm is going to be on another map entirely after tonight. Knowing how to run it gracefully goes with the territory.”

“Did you have to learn all this stuff?”

“Every bit of it. How do you think I know?”

Earlier that afternoon they had walked through the bunkhouse. Fires blazed on the great stone hearths and the narrow bunks were deep with drifted featherbeds and old linens. Beside each stood a rough carved chest, and on each one Lulu had put a fat white candle in a hurricane glass and a small vase of holly and ivy. The stone floors were strewn with snowy fleeces, and between the fireplaces the other great pine stood, unadorned and lordly, breathing out the living essence of the woods. At either end of the room, in front of the fireplaces, tables had been set up and covered with green cloths, wooden chairs drawn up to them.

“There’ll be a good bit of poker tonight,” Lulu said.

Just behind them, narrower tables—sawhorses with planks, Emily thought—had been covered in white. A staggering array of liquors were arranged on them, and silver bowls already full of benné crackers and boiled peanuts. Two impassive black men in white jackets stood easily behind them, talking in low voices.

“Miss Lulu,” they said when Lulu and Emily entered.

“Simon,” Lulu said warmly. “Charles. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“Glad to do it, Miss Lulu.”

Before going to the bunkhouse, they had looked briefly into the old stables, scrubbed and warm now, and piled deep with fresh straw, to see the old-fashioned buckboard wagons that had come over that afternoon from Maybud, and the four shining, impassive mules, also trucked over, who would pull the wagons in the morning.

“Mules?” Emily had looked up at Lulu.

“For some reason, the winter hunts always go out in mules and wagons with the men in one and the dogs in another. These are the same drivers we use at Maybud, and the same mules. The men will have had coffee and brandy, or neat whiskey, or whatever, and probably ham and biscuits. At noon a wagon will come out with Bloody Marys and a hot lunch. The drivers will set it up and serve it, and in the late afternoon everybody and the dogs will come back with the ducks, and while the men are cleaning up and changing, our men will clean and dress the ducks and have them ready in case anybody wants one cooked up at the last minute.”

“My lord, what a to-do over a bunch of ducks,” Emily said, inhaling the sweet smell of wood shavings and mule hide.

“Going to sell a lot of Boykins,” Lulu said.

In the house, Lulu walked Emily around. Candles glowed everywhere; fires snickered behind their screens, and stair rails and mantels and sideboards were festooned with garlands of fresh greenery. The great tree in the foyer looked just as Lulu had said it would, a captured forest giant in the high-ceilinged gloom. They had made wreaths for every window, centered with a white taper, and on the front door they hung a great wreath of pine and cedar, studded with shells and moss and holly. The porch lights were already lit, so the wreath blazed out into the gathering darkness in a penumbra of light. In the library, small living holly trees in pots stood about the fireplace, and smilax and magnolia leaves gleamed. Small tables covered with white damask were scattered about in front of the old sofa, along with a phalanx of borrowed gilt Maybud chairs.

“People will probably bring their plates in here to eat,” Lulu said. “There are too many to seat, and a buffet the night before a hunt is traditional, anyway.”

In the dining room, the old oval table had been draped with silky, thin white damask and set with ornate silver platters and tureens and flatware. More white candles gleamed in tall silver candelabra, and a towering, beautiful old pierced silver bowl on a pedestal sat in the middle, heaped with holly and pomegranates and trailing ivy. An épergne, Lulu said. It had come over with the Lords Proprietors too. Emily thought it looked it.

On the sideboard a massive silver service and translucent porcelain cups and saucers rested, and cloudy old decanters of brandies and liqueurs. A full bar stood in the foyer, just to one side of the tree, snowy white and groaning under bottles of wine and liquor. Candles flickered here, too, and holly shone softly, and behind the bar a white-coated Maybud man stood at parade rest, studying the assortment of garnishes set out in small silver bowls.

“Miss Lulu,” he said.

“Evening, Peter,” Lulu said. “You look ready for action.

“Here’s what happens,” Lulu said after they had inspected the foyer and library and dining room.

“You’ll stand beside your father at the door and greet everybody as they come in. I’ll introduce you, and you repeat their names and smile and say you’re glad they could come. The twins will take their coats and their overnight things and put them out in the bunkhouse, and your father will tell them to help themselves at the bar and join him in the library. After everybody’s got a drink and is settled in, you walk through and ask if everybody has everything they need, or if you can get something for them. Smiling, Emily. Then you excuse yourself and go into the kitchen and get everything in there going.”

Emily was panting with terror.

“You’re not going to make me do all that by myself,” she choked.

“Oh, don’t be silly, of course not,” Lulu said. “But you’d better pay attention, because next time you
will
have to do it by yourself. And do it right. Now for the kitchen.”

The cavernous kitchen blazed with light and steamed with wonderful smells. More worktables had been brought in, and on them, and on the big old oak center table, pots and dishes and trays of food—Emily recognized little broiled quail, and tenderloin of beef and venison, and a plate of rosy sliced duck breast—stood ready to be brought out into the dining room or put into the great, wheezing oven. Pots on the stove simmered, and the smell of shrimp and oysters and sherry and herbs and baking bread made Emily’s mouth water, dry with fright though it was. Aproned black women from Maybud whisked back and forth, doing unfathomable things to anonymous dishes, chattering and laughing among themselves. In the center of it all, like a great dark mountain, Cleta loomed, unaccustomedly aproned in white and holding a whisk like a baton. She did not speak, but her eyes followed the Maybud workers’ every move and her lips were pursed with disapproval.

Emily ran to her and hugged her, grateful for a familiar island in this sea of chaos, and Cleta hugged her back and then held her off and looked at her. Her face softened into a smile.

“Look at you, Emily,” she said. “Look right out of
Gone With the Wind
, you do. Is those new earrings?”

“They’re emeralds,” Emily said proudly. “Lulu gave them to me for my birthday.”

“Huh,” Cleta said.

Lulu showed Emily how to inspect each dish as it was put into its service piece and then set on the table in the dining room. Emily should, the first few times she did this, keep a small list and check off the steps one by one.