Sweetwater Creek (3 page)

Emily nodded but did not turn, and went out of the breakfast room. Behind her, she heard one of the twins say, “Where’s the library? You mean the office? Dad, it looks like a hundred-year-old kennel in there.”

Emily heard her father’s voice in response, but she did not hear what he said. Whatever it was, it did not matter.

Her father had decreed that Elvis sleep that night in the kennels with the other dogs so that his guest would not see him coming out of the house. It was not seemly for a champion flushing spaniel to be a house pet. Emily had taken him out to the kennels and settled him into a big one, warm with deep fresh straw, and told him to be quiet for a little while. He was; he watched her anxiously from behind the cage bars when she left, but he did not fuss. When the house was finally dark and quiet she slipped down the fine old spiral staircase, flaking paint now, and out to the kennels where she released him.

“Shhh,” she whispered. He wagged his stumpy tail and padded silently beside her left heel into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom. Girl and spaniel slept that night as they always had, so deeply curled into each other that they might have been conjoined.

It was only five hours later that she woke him and took him back to the kennels. She sat down on the straw with him and put her arms around him.

“You’re going out with Daddy and a real big shot today. Daddy wants to show you off. I won’t be there, but you know how to do everything he’ll ask you.”

She stopped, seeing in her mind endless cold, dark mornings, with Elvis being loaded into the trailer and taken out to the freezing marsh to bring back to the blind the warm, now-limp ducks who wintered there. She saw him scrambling out of the water with a wood duck in his mouth, wagging his tail and taking it straight to a grinning Walter Parmenter. Emily thought wood ducks the most beautiful birds she had ever seen. Her eyes filled with tears.

“You just do what you think is right,” she said. He wagged his tail and grinned at her, his yellow eyes full of trust and love. By the time Emily was back in bed a cold red dawn was breaking over the steely river outside her window. Soon she heard the growling of a powerful engine, and her father’s jovial voice welcoming the incoming supermarket tabloid king, who replied in a clipped New England accent.

She crept to the landing window and looked out. In the chill fog off the river she saw the dim outlines of her father and two brothers standing beside a huge custom hunting vehicle shaking hands with the visitor. Her father’s voice was hearty and booming, not level and almost toneless as it usually was. She cringed in embarrassment. Her brothers faded into the fog and came back with Elvis on a chain lead. The old two-dog aluminum crate already sat in the bed of her father’s Dodge pickup. Just before one of the twins hoisted him up into the crate, Elvis looked up in Emily’s direction and wagged his tail. Emily ran back to her bed and pulled the covers over her head and wept. She did not hear the hunting party move out.

By two o’clock that afternoon most of the dinner preparations were done and the table set. Cleta shoved the enormous wild turkey that Carter had shot and dressed into the oven. The black iron pan of corn bread-and-oyster dressing was ready to be put in an hour before dinnertime. Two pecan pies sat cooling on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

Cleta put on her outsized down-filled jacket and prepared to go home. Emily knew that she would begin cooking for her own household when she got there. She had said there would be roughly eighteen for dinner. Cleta had kin all over the Lowcountry.

“It doesn’t seem right that you should spend practically a whole day cooking for just us when you’ve got all those folks to feed at home,” Emily had said to her once.

“Shoot, I’m glad to get home this late,” Cleta said. “Bertha and the girls will be so hungry they’ll have made up the dressin’ just so they can cook some extra and gobble it, an’ all the men will have been into the shine since noon. Nobody be ’specially hungry, and half of ’em be too drunk to care if I’m late. Works out real good.”

Now she said, “Y’all have a happy Thanksgiving. I sho’ do hope things work out for Mr. Walter.”

Her expression said that she had her doubts on this matter.

Emily and Jenny took rags and brooms and silver polish and the bulbous old Hoover and went down the hall to the small room that served as office, trophy room, refuge, and sometime puppy pen for Walter Parmenter. Emily was seldom invited into it. Walt Junior and Carter sometimes closed themselves in with their father, but usually it was Walter’s domain alone. Cleta dusted and Hoovered occasionally, but was not allowed to touch anything else.

“My God, it looks like the stock room in a feed store,” Jenny Raiford said. “If Mr. Gotrocks comes in here he’ll choke to death.”

Dust swirled in the dim light, puffed up from the wrinkled oriental throw rugs, and poured like smoke from the heavy, faded damask draperies that were pulled shut over the tall french doors onto the porch. The mahogany paneling and shelving, once thought unrivaled in quality among the river plantations, were now felted with dust. Doors, window frames, and mantel, all carved with sunbursts, fans, and Chippendale gougework, were a uniform smoky gray from years of fires in the small grate. The floor of the fireplace itself was completely buried under a sooty black and silvery gray drift of ash. The shelves were jammed with tarnished trophies and faded ribbons and photographs of grime-dimmed spaniels. Sacks of dog food and cedar bedding and boxes that had held whelping bitches covered most of the wide-planked cypress floor. Dusty scrapbooks were piled on the twin leather Morris chairs beside the fireplace. Walter’s desk, under the tall windows, was piled chin-high with account books, legal pads, ancient hunting magazines, and yellowing newspapers. A roll of toilet paper sat on top of the heap.

“Where should we put the silver tray of benné seed biscuits and the sherry? On his desk beside the toilet paper or over there on that fifty-pound sack of Eukanuba?” Emily said, beginning to laugh helplessly.

“I could tell him where to put it,” Jenny said, beginning to laugh too. It was impossible not to.

Two hours later the shelves were cleared out, the sack of dog food was moved to the back porch, the rugs and furniture and drapes were Hoovered, Walter’s desk was cleared and polished, the fireplace was clean, and a fire had been freshly laid and ready to light. Jenny brought in a large copper vase of bittersweet berries, and Emily was finishing up the silver frames of the photographs on the mantelpiece.

She picked up the last one, a large photo of a beautiful, unremembered Boykin, and the photo slipped out onto the floor, revealing another behind it. Emily took it over to the now-sparkling windows and stared at it. It, too, was badly yellowed, but she could make out the figure of a stocky man with ginger hair and a slender, erect blond man with a barrel trunk, short legs, a fine chest and shoulders, and a large head. He wore a V-neck sweater over a button-down white shirt and was almost movie-star handsome. Between them stood a willowy girl almost as tall as them, with long, perfectly straight auburn hair and slender, pretty legs under a miniskirt. Both men had their arms around the girl, and she was smiling with unmistakable delight. Both men were squinting solemnly into the sun.

She looked at it a long time and then turned to her aunt.

“Why, this is you! Isn’t it? Just look at that skirt…and Lordy, this is
Daddy
! And I guess this is Grandaddy Carter. Aunt Jenny, Daddy looks just exactly like he did then. And you look—really, really pretty…”

Jenny Raiford came over into the light and took the photo from Emily. She looked at it for a long time, her head bent over it.

“Yes,” she said, raising it to look at Emily. There was a sort of pinched look around her nostrils that Emily associated with sick people.

“That’s us, all right. I haven’t seen this since…I guess right after it was taken. What would it be…
1969
?
1970
? Where did you find it?”

“Stuck behind this dog picture on the mantel,” Emily said. “I wonder why? It’s a great picture of you and Daddy…”

“I wonder why, too,” Jenny said. “Well, come on, let’s get these trophies polished and go have a cup of tea or a Coke. I feel like I’ve swallowed a bale of cotton.”

She set the picture smartly down on Walter’s desk and went out of the room. In the kitchen, Emily stared at her. Her aunt moved quickly and with sharp movements, not at all with her usual lazy, flat-footed grace. Emily remembered that Jennifer Carter had studied ballet at the College of Charleston. Jenny kept her face turned away.

“Who took the picture?” Emily said. “Did…my mother take it?”

“No,” her aunt said. “She was still at Converse. I don’t even think she’d met your dad yet. Our daddy brought him home from a field trial the day it was taken. I’d just met him.”

Emily could hear unsaid words. She came sometimes to know, usually unwillingly, the thoughts of others. Her place in the world depended on it; her father and brothers made almost none for her. She looked at her aunt’s straight back and thought, “She was in love with him. He was her beau first. You can see it on her face in the picture. How did it get to be my mother he married?”

But she knew the answer. Caroline Carter had come home from school with her curls and curves and lilting laughter and set her great hazel-gold eyes on Walter Parmenter, and that was that.

“I guess she married ol’ Truman Raiford on the rebound,” Emily thought. “What a mistake
that
was. I don’t think…I wish my mother hadn’t done that.”

“But then where would I be? And where would Walt Junior and Carter be? Would there ever have been Buddy?” She opened her mouth to ask more questions, and Jenny said, still not looking at her, “Let it alone, Emily. It was a long time ago.”

Emily might have persisted but for the rattling sound of the Dodge pickup in the front drive. Car doors slammed and men’s voices spun briefly out into the cold, pale air, and then there was the sound of a heavy, expensive SUV purring to life and retreating down the driveway, and then silence. A long silence.

“What on earth are they doing home so early? I thought your dad said sundown…” Jenny said.

A lump of ice began to form in Emily’s chest. She stood still and silent.

The front door flew open and she heard her father’s heavy footsteps come into the foyer. They did not stop at the kitchen, but went straight up the stairs. A door slammed, and then there was silence again.

In a moment Walt Junior and Carter came into the kitchen. Their faces were raw with cold, and they did not have the look of happy hunters home from the hill. Behind them, on Carter’s left heel, Elvis padded obediently. He looked up at her. There was no life in his golden eyes, and his stumpy tail did not wag. He merely sat down quietly in front of the boys. He would not look up at Emily. The silence spun out again, as palpable as the dust motes in the slanting afternoon sunshine.

“What happened?” Emily whispered finally, around the lump of ice in her chest. “Where’s Mr. Thing?”

“Mr. Thing has gone home to quote, think it over,” Carter said. “You ought to put that stuff somewhere out of sight.” He gestured at the shining decanter of sherry and pierced silver platter of warm benné biscuits. “I don’t think Dad’s going to want to see it.”

“Carter…” Emily began, desperately.

“Elvis wouldn’t hunt,” her brother said briefly. The muscles beside his mouth twitched. “He did it all perfectly. He was beautiful. Mr. Thing, as you call him, was knocked out with him. And then he shot a mallard and Elvis got right up to the water and crouched down to jump…and then he looked around at us and grinned, and wagged his tail, and wouldn’t move. Nothing Dad did could make him. Nothing. We finally just came on back. If I was you I’d get that dog out of sight for a while. I think Daddy might kill him.”

Trembling, Emily knelt down and put her arms around Elvis. She could feel a fine shivering and twitching muscles under his damp, curly coat.

“Did anybody yell at him—or hit him?” she whispered. Elvis put his head under her arm and burrowed against her.

“Oh, shit, no, of course not,” Walt Junior said impatiently. “You know Daddy wouldn’t mistreat a dog. He just didn’t…talk to him anymore. Bundled him into the crate and stuck him in the back of the truck and brought him home. He was out of it and up the steps before Carter and I could open our door. We got the crate down and let Elvis out. He knows he did a bad thing, though. Look at him.”

Emily gathered the dog up in her arms and stood, holding him close against her.

“He did not do a bad thing. He’s never done a bad thing in his life!” she spat, feeling her face whiten as the blood rushed from it. “The only bad thing anybody did today was to take him out there and show him off like a…a prize steer! I hope he never hunts! I hope he won’t hunt for anybody else on this place ever again!”

She turned to start up the stairs to her bedroom with Elvis. Her father’s bedroom door flew open, and he stood at the top of the landing looking down at her. She stopped still. His face was tight and white, and there was wildfire in his eyes.

“What the hell did you tell that dog?”
he shouted at Emily.

She was up the stairs with the dog and past him and in her room before she heard her aunt Jenny say, in a hushed, furious voice, “What are you talking about, Walter Parmenter? Are you crazy? Just listen to yourself. Don’t you speak like that to Emily ever again in my…”

Emily slammed her door and, for the first time she could remember, locked it. It was a very long time before she opened it again. When she did, nothing and everything had changed.

DEEP INTO THANKSGIVING
night Emily dreamed.

She dreamed of a crystalline white mist rolling in from the river, much like the usual fall and winter mists and yet not. This mist was palpable. It had form. It spread itself in a layer over the house and the river and the marsh, over all the plantation land, from Toogoodoo Creek upland almost to Hollywood, back down to Yonges Island on the Wadmalaw River, to the mouth of the North Edisto.

Somehow she was riding on the mist, sitting cross-legged atop it. Soft sweet sun spilled down over her. Fresh wind teased her hair. She was looking down on the plantation that she should not have been able to see through the carved-marble white mist. For a long time she simply sat on the mist and looked, and was happier than she could remember being in her life.

She was directly over the house, and she could see it as clearly as if in ordinary daylight. The simple Greek Revival architecture was the same, with the two-story main house and the wings spreading out from it, and the encircling wooden porch and the four plain white wooden columns. It still sat on its arched brick foundation, raised to catch the breezes from the broad Wadmalaw behind it. Sweetwater had never been an ornate, manorial plantation like those of the Ashley and Cooper and the Peedee Rivers. But it had a kind of pared-down symmetry that seemed a part of the river light and the wide skies over it, and in the dream it gave off its own light, soft and radiant, like an August moon.

It was morning in the dream, a spring morning, and the new gold-green of the marshes and the shining fresh-paint green of live oak groves that had never been there glistened like vermeil. Wildflowers rioted on the higher ground behind and to the north of the house, where on other days there was only broom sedge and scrubby low trees and brush and ditches, all rimmed with the dark, encroaching forest. Quail land, Emily had come to think of it. A garden more beautiful than anything Emily had ever seen in a book surrounded the house: roses, daylilies, iris, azaleas, camellias, annuals in a riot of improbable colors; velvety, perfectly trimmed boxwood hedges. Off in the marsh and on the hummocks, live oaks spilled curtains of silvery moss onto the high grass, and resurrection ferns burned primal green. At the marshes’ edges the spartina danced in a light wind that smelled so densely of the clean, fishy river and the sea far beyond it that you could get drunk on it. A hundred bird songs haunted the shimmering air. Over it all arched the great tender, washed-blue skies of spring.

Emily felt drunk—drunk with happiness and a sense of safety and cherishing, drunk with sheer possibility. She found that she could move the mist by leaning this way or that, and she sent herself sailing placidly down to the river, which danced and shone like spilled mercury.

From above the wooden walkway and dock, which stretched far over the marsh out to where the river ran swift and deep, she heard music, and she saw people and animals and boats. The boats made a long line from the dock back practically to the great turn into Toogoodoo Creek. Beyond the turn you would need only to drift past Bears Bluff to be in the great North Edisto, which ran directly into the open Atlantic between Edisto and Seabrook Islands. The boats were beautiful, towering three-masted schooners with their sails furled, wallowing gently on the morning tide. Their decks were crowded with people she could not see clearly. None of this surprised Emily. The boats were stitched unalterably into the fabric of the day.

The music came at her in bursts and sweeps: a skirl of Pachelbel, a ribbon of Bach—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” she thought; Buddy had loved it—a joyous, rhythmic shout of song rising over strange old drums and tambourines, surely a Gullah praise song; a thread of the Shirelles singing “Foolish Little Girl,” Carolina beach music at its best; a soaring snatch of the Fifth Dimension singing “The Age of Aquarius”—who was it who had loved that song? Emily could not remember, but the song made glee rise and catch in her throat. The music was not incongruous. Emily thought how empty this magical air would be without it.

The people who stood on the dock beside the first ship, unlike those on the boat’s deck, were as clear as if they had been outlined in light. There was her father, his tanned face lifted to the sun, laughing. Aunt Jenny stood beside him, dressed in something long and flowery, its skirts and her unbound hair blowing in the wind. She was smiling up at Walter Parmenter. The twins were there, in their beloved, disreputable old camouflage hunting clothes, grinning and shoving each other amiably. Behind them, alone in a wagging, grinning turmoil of beautiful, red-burning Boykins, stood Buddy.

Emily could hardly suppress a shout of joy, but she knew in the dream that to speak would rupture it. Buddy stood tall and lanky, taller than anyone else on the deck, hands in the pockets of madras walking shorts, a blue oxford cloth shirt rolled up over his brown wrists and arms. He had sunglasses pushed up into the thick dark blond hair that was his father’s, and every now and then he reached a sockless boat shoe out to tap a fractious spaniel. Emily knew she was seeing Buddy not as he had been, but as he might have been if he had lived to college age. He had wanted to study poetry and drama at Yale.

A ship’s long hoot sounded, and the jib on the leading schooner spilled out into the air and caught the little wind. The people on the dock all smiled up at her and filed aboard. They stood staring out over the bow, watching the swirl of the water. They did not look up at her again. Ever so gently the ship moved off into the broad river. In a moment another of the great sails bloomed.

Emily leaned forward to follow on her ledge of mist, but it would not move. She tried again and again: nothing. By the time the ship reached the Bears Bluff its suit of sail was full and proud, and it was moving fast on the current in a following wind.

She opened her mouth to call, “Wait! Come back! You’ve left me!” but she could not get words out. There seemed to be cotton in her throat. Her heart was hammering with fear and loss, and by the time she produced a small shriek, the ship was gone around the point into the Edisto and out of sight.

Emily sobbed once, a great, hiccuping shudder of pure aloneness. She leaned this way and that, trying to make the mist move, but it might have been stone. And then it began to move of itself, swirling around over the river and flowing off directly across the island, over the marsh and forest, faster and faster, until she could see nothing below, and feel only wind and sun. Both now felt cold.

She was hunched over on her side, hugging her knees and attempting to burrow into the mist for safety, when it slowed and stopped. Once again, she could see through it clearly, to the earth below. She was over Sweetwater Creek, where it ran into the Toogoodoo, the exact place where the dolphins came in the summers. She could even see the grooves of last summer’s slides. Her fear slid slowly into the comfort of familiarity. She felt a sudden surety that the mist was not, after all, going to float her off the edge of the world. For a long time she simply sat still, looking down as the ribbon of tidal water swept in to fill the high-banked, corrugated creek bed. The tiny rivulet that it was at low tide would scarcely accommodate a shrimp. But at full tide it would be wide and deep and the blue-black of the reflected sky, and alive with tiny transparent and incandescent creatures and other life, on up the spectrum to the splashing mullet in the mullet holes, and big, thick-tailed, sluggish gators. On either side the cordgrass swept away, a waving meadow of a million greens.

Emily looked over it to the hummock directly across Sweetwater Creek, where she often saw the flashing white ensigns of deer, and on several occasions a small, wind-bent oak so thickly packed with nesting white herons that it looked like a tree in a Currier and Ives winter print. Under the great oak that was the centerpiece of the hummock little sunlight reached the ground, but Emily had seen wood ibises clustered there, pecking away at the earth, and once a doe and fawn sheltering from the rain.

Today, a woman in something fluid and shining and peach-colored sat on the rich grass, her legs folded out to the side. A winking ray of sun caught her hair, which crackled with red life, and dappled the pearled white of her shoulders and neck. Creamy pearls glowed against her throat, and, though it did not seem possible, her scent of tuberoses and fresh rain was strong and warm in Emily’s nostrils. Beside her, in the circle of her white arm, sat Elvis.

“That’s my mother,” Emily said aloud, her chest constricted with joy and longing. “I remember that nightgown and those pearls. I remember the way she smelled when she leaned over me at night. I’d know her anywhere! Why did I ever think I couldn’t remember her?”

She leaned into the mist hoping it would take her over the marsh to the hummock, and it did move a little way before it stopped again. It was close enough now that she could see her mother’s face, and the little V-shaped kitten’s smile on her lips, and the tangle of curls over her forehead. In the nest of her arm, Elvis wriggled happily and looked up at her. He was, indeed, the same color as her mother’s hair. He smiled his doggy smile.

“Mama! I want to come over there,” Emily called. “Please don’t leave! Hold on to Elvis! I’ve been looking for you such a long time…”

She gave a mighty lunge forward and the mist began to move again, slowly and jerkily. For some reason, Emily felt herself sinking slightly into it. Below its surface it was wet and thick and cold.

Her mother sat upright and held Elvis close to her. She was shaking her head, and making pushing-away movements with her other hand. Elvis began to bark. It was his warning bark.

“Go back! Go back!” her mother called. “You can’t come here! This is not for you! Go back…”

“It
is
for me! I
am
coming there!” Emily cried in terror and sorrow. She struggled to stand in the mist, to pull it forcibly behind her, to dive into and through it. Suddenly there was nothing around her but cold, white mist, mist that put sticky fingers into her nose and mouth and drenched her hair, mist that blinded her and filled her throat and lay wet and icy on her face. She struggled and flailed against it, fought against the suffocating, drowning whiteness…and woke up deep under the covers of her bed, struggling to breathe, her face wet with tears and the anxious ministrations of Elvis’s tongue. She could hear a small, unhappy whining in his throat. She took a great rattling breath, put her arms around him, and sat up in bed.

Even after her heart had stopped its sick thudding, and her tears had dried, Emily did not move. She sat in the middle of her bedraggled covers, breathing slowly so as not to make noise, holding Elvis warm against her frozen chest and shoulders. Her pajamas were wet, too, and the sheet around her. Cold and wet, as if they had just been pulled from chilly brackish water. It was not until her eyes acclimated to the dark and she could see the faint gray of dawn around the curtains and the pale light that outlined her closed door, that she got up out of bed and found fresh, warm flannel pajamas and a dry top sheet, and jumped back into her bed with Elvis. They lay close together for a long time. She did not think about the dream, and she did not think about anything else, either. Warmth and dog were the only things that had substance.

It was not until Elvis began to wriggle restlessly, and to whine, that she realized that it must be the middle of the night, and both of them had been locked in this room for a long time. He was undoubtedly hungry, and needed to be taken out.

“Good boy,” she whispered, getting up and wrapping herself in her too-small fleece bathrobe and slipping on her wooly slippers. “Good boy. You didn’t make a sound until you just couldn’t stand it, did you? Come on. We’ll go out now, and we’ll get something to eat.”

Girl and dog moved soundlessly down the dim hall, past her father and brothers’ bedrooms, which were dark and closed, and down the great sweep of staircase. Emily had long known which stairs squeaked, and avoided them. Elvis did, too. She slowly opened the back door onto the porch and he trotted out and down the steps to the grass, did his business, and came directly back. Emily knew that if she had looked up she would have seen the incredible, extravagant pageant of winter stars over the river, and perhaps the running black shape of something whose purview was night and wildness, but she did not look. She was afraid she would see, forming over the quiet river, the curling edges of mist reaching out to the shore.

The afternoon before, both her aunt and Cleta had come to her door and knocked softly, coaxing her to come down and eat her Thanksgiving dinner, telling her the coast was clear; her father and the boys were shut up in the small, glass-enclosed section of the porch they used for a TV room, lost in the football games, unlikely to come out or hear anything until much later.

Emily had not answered, and finally her aunt had called, “I have to go now, sweetie, but I’ll talk to you tomorrow or the next day. Tell you all about Columbia. Maybe you can go with me next time.”

She heard her aunt’s steps going away. Presently Cleta called out.

“I gotta go on home for a little while, but I’m leaving you a plate at your door. You call me if you need me. I just be at home. Don’t worry, baby, he don’t mean nothing he say half the time. Probably done forgot all about it. They in there lisenin’ to that football game and eatin’ pie.”

Cleta’s heavier tread went away down the stairs, and then there was silence. Utter silence. Emily knew she did not sleep until much later, but she did not hear her father and brothers come up to bed. And no one stirred now, as she and Elvis crawled deeply back under the piled covers of her bed. She had been afraid that the sheer awfulness of the dream would keep her awake, but it did not. Both girl and dog slid into sleep before the covers had settled.

When she woke, it was late, toward noon. She could tell by the rectangle of light on her bedroom floor, let in by the place where the curtains would never quite close. From hundreds of mornings gauging how long she might linger in bed by the position of the oblong, Emily knew that it was near noon.