Low Country (48 page)

He turned his face away.

“I don’t need it. I think I knew when you told me.

Hayes…something has eaten Hayes up inside, like a

worm. There’s nothing left but rottenness. I don’t know

why I never saw it happening. He’s going with South

Ward, by the way; it’s been in the works for months.

He hit me with that, too. He was to deliver the project

and then go in as chief counsel and a managing part-

ner. He’d have been out of Peacock’s before the dust

settled. The deal was that he’d be able to stay in

Charleston, too; Hayes had it all figured out.”

“Well, he’ll have to refigure then.…”

“No, I think they’ll still take him. Oh, he won’t be

chief anything, and he’ll have to move to Atlanta, and

that will kill him and Lucy, and he’ll never make any-

where near the money he stood to make this way…but

Hayes is good about finding venture capital. He ought

to be able

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to smell out enough for South Ward so that they’ll

keep him. I think, for Hayes, living in a suburb of At-

lanta near a strip shopping mall and being a middle-

level money cruncher for South Ward will be worse

than jail. Maybe there’s some justice in the world after

all. I’d like to think there’s a little, after what I’ve

done.…”

“But if you’ve pulled out of the Dayclear project,

what harm
have
you done?” I said, reaching out to

turn him around so that he faced me. His shoulder felt

familiar again all of a sudden, muscle and bone that I

knew.

He turned. His face shocked me. I felt my breath die

in my chest.

“Ezra came for another reason,” he whispered.

“Tell me,” I said.

And that is when he took both my hands in his cold

ones, and told me that Luis Cassells had spun the

Harley off a long curve halfway between Edisto and

Columbia near midnight the night before, and crashed

into a tree, and died, the state patrol thought, on im-

pact.

14

T
he storm the newscasts had promised us
came a

day early, screaming in from the west on a fast-running

river of upper air. It hit about three o’clock that after-

noon, out of a sky gone inky black and lurid with

flickering lightning, and stalled out over the Lowcoun-

try. It crouched there for twenty-four hours, alternately

flooding the sea and marshes with torrential cold rains

and scourging them with great, punishing winds.

Sometimes there was the spatter of hail on the house’s

tin roof, and sometimes the light went queer and thick

and green and Clay would stand me up and walk me

hurriedly into the middle hall, where there were no

windows, until the dull bellow high overhead passed

and became ordinary rain again. Several tornadoes

spun out of the low, flat clouds; I learned later that

North Charleston had been nipped by one, and a

couple of blocks were tree

Low Country / 437

less and shingleless in Peacock Plantation, and the

usual trailer park casualties had occurred. Much later

Lottie told me that the trailer that Luis and Lita had

borrowed was rocked off its foundation, though no

real damage was done. It was as if the very air howled

in grief and outrage for Luis Cassells.

I remember very little of the storm. For almost its

day-and-night-long duration, I cried.

I began to cry at Clay’s words that morning. I felt

as though a lance had gone straight into a monstrous

sac of pain deep within me and let it erupt. I cried

great, shuddering sobs and moans that rose sometimes

into real screams, and gasped for breath that would

not come until my chest heaved and black specks

danced before my eyes, and then sobbed again. I cried

so much that I thought I would die of it; I did not think

that the human heart and lungs could process that

many tears, withstand that kind of savage, battering

grief. When I stopped momentarily, gasping and

rocking back and forth, I could feel a profound aching

deep in the muscles of my stomach and under my ribs

that felt mortal. I frightened myself badly with the ve-

locity and duration of my grief and my inability to stop

it, and I know that I frightened Clay. After an hour or

so of rocking me in his arms on the sofa while the

world outside blazed with lightning and boomed with

thunder, and I wept, he picked me up and walked with

me into the bed

438 / Anne Rivers Siddons

room and laid me under the covers and crawled in

beside me. For the rest of that roaring afternoon, he

held me hard against him and I cried in my grandfath-

er’s old bed.

Sometimes, in a momentary lull, I would try to ex-

plain to him that it was not just for Luis Cassells that

I cried, and I knew that that was true, although the

thought of that lonely death on a dark country roadside

would send me back into a fury of tears whenever it

came, unbidden, into my mind.

“It’s everything, Clay,” I would hiccup. “It feels like

it’s just everything that ever happened to me. He was

never…like that…to me. It’s just…he gave me back

Kylie, in a way. He showed me how to let her go so

she could come back. And, Clay, he showed me how

to stop the drinking; I haven’t drunk anything since

way before he…” And the tears would start again,

endlessly, endlessly.

“I know,” he would murmur against my hair. “I

know. I know who you’re crying for. You never did,

did you? It’s all right. Cry all you need to.”

He didn’t know, not really; I did cry for Kylie, of

course, but through all of that vast storm of anguish I

felt her, that fiery living kernel of her, within me,

burning steadily. I cried, I think, for not having gotten

her back sooner, and I cried for Nissy and her colt,

and I cried for the awful,

Low Country / 439

slinking thing that had ripped Clay away from me and

had given me back this man who, even while I clung

to him, was a stranger to me. I cried for the life that I

had not even liked very much, perhaps, but that had

been the one I knew. I cried for the fear that my fool-

ishness had permitted the Gullahs of Dayclear. I cried

for the gangling, vulnerable teenager who had grown

to manhood waiting for me to really see him again. I

cried for the man who had grown so nearly old waiting

for the same thing. I even cried for Hayes Howland,

for the young Hayes in tennis whites who had brought

me my husband on a summer day.

All that I knew. Still, I could not stop.

Late in the afternoon the phone began to ring and

people began to come to the house. Clay would leave

me for a moment, to talk in low tones on the phone

or to whisper hurriedly to whomever stood in the

streaming doorway, but he always came back and got

into bed with me again.

“Okay,” he would say, pulling me against him. “Let

’er rip.” And I did.

It was a strange state; in a way it was like the feverish

fugue state in which I had painted that night before

Ezra and Lottie had come. I seemed mired in the same

fireshot old darkness, though I realized on some level

that it was only the lightning outside, and the flickering

of the fire in the little bedroom fireplace. I saw images

and heard

440 / Anne Rivers Siddons

things with preternatural clarity: I heard Ezra’s voice

once, from the living room, talking about the funeral

service for Luis, and I heard Sophia Bridges’s cool clear

voice saying, “…I’ll take her, of course, but it isn’t me

she wants,” and knew that she was speaking of Lita,

and could not do anything at all about it. Lita…I found

that I could not even think of Lita.

Later, in the full night, I heard Sophia again, telling

Clay to give me a cup whenever I would take it, and

knew that Auntie Tuesday had sent her magical tea,

and actually smiled to myself before the tears started

again. And I heard her telling him about Lita, about

the horror that had taken her mother and baby brother

and her journey to Luis, and about her silence. I

gathered that she was silent again, once more at

Auntie’s house, and that the tea and the broth were

not working, and that everyone was frightened for her.

I was, too, but I could not make my muscles move me

toward the edge of the bed.

“Ezra and I wanted to bring her over here, but Auntie

says let Caro be. She says a lot of poison has got to

come out before she can help Lita or anybody else.

She says give her the broth and the tea until tomorrow

and then we’ll see. It’s Caro’s time now. Auntie will

tend to Lita.”

Presently she went away, back into the storm, and

Clay came into the room with a tray of Auntie’s

steaming fiddlehead broth, and I took it from

Low Country / 441

him and drank it down greedily. I knew that it would

spin me down into sleep. I thought if I cried anymore

I would surely die.

Sleep came then. A sleep unlike any other I have

ever known. In it fires burned and drums beat and

animals flickered through forests of a primary greenness

I had never known, and children ran laughing and

shrieking, and hot blue seas beat on yellow sand, and

great, hectic flowers hung from vines like boa constrict-

ors. I remember thinking, as you do in dreams, that

this was Eden, and I must be very careful or I would

be cast out of it. It was not a peaceful Eden, not sweet,

not idyllic, but it was so ravenously alive and exuberant

in its fecundity that I could almost feel the fabric of a

still-wet new world forming itself around me.

I woke the next morning with tears still damp on

my face, but this time they were tears of a fierce joy. I

knew, without knowing how, that for a time I would

not cry again.

I was alone in the tumbled bed. I stretched long and

hard, feeling the soreness around my chest and dia-

phragm muscles from the storms of tears, and listened

for the storm outside. It had slunk off in the night,

leaving only a steady rain to patter on the roof. Even

in my drowsing state I knew that it would be a cold

rain. Spring had left us on the wings of the storm.

“Breakfast,” Clay said, coming into the room

442 / Anne Rivers Siddons

with a tray, and I sat up. He was in the ratty old terry

cloth robe he kept out here, and there were damp comb

tracks in his hair. He was freshly shaved, too, but his

eyes were wary and darkly shadowed, and the muscles

of his jaw were as slack as if they had been pounded.

I doubted that he had slept at all.

He brought coffee and pastries that I recognized as

Janie Biggins’s cream cheese turnovers, and orange

juice. And he brought a damp washcloth and a mirror

and comb and a long-sleeved flannel nightgown

smelling of mothballs.

“Good morning,” I tried to say, but my voice was a

painful husk in my sore throat.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “You’ll bust something for

good.”

He handed me the hot washcloth and I scrubbed

my face with it, then looked into the mirror and

flinched. A wild-haired, slit-eyed, mottled-cheeked witch

looked back at me. I combed the snarls out of my hair

and tied it back with the shoelace he had found, and

took a long, scorching swallow of the coffee.

“My God,” I croaked. “That was…extraordinary. I’m

sorry, Clay. I had no idea…I don’t know what…”

“You’re entitled,” he said. “As long as you give me

an hour’s notice if you think you’re going to do it

again. I thought you were dying. I thought you were

just going to…cry up your

Low Country / 443

insides and die. So did everybody else. Only Ezra’s

aunt seemed to know what to do for you. Is her name

really Tuesday?”

“It really is. She’s a conjure woman, they say. A

healer. And she
can
heal. I’d take anything she gave

me, even if it was green and smoking. She sent the tea

and the broth, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. I was afraid to give it to you, but Sophia said

for me to,”

“I thought I heard Sophia. I hope…I know she

resigned, Clay. I hope there’s no hard feelings between

you. She’s a good person. She’s been a good friend to

me.”

“Caro, I didn’t even think about that. I don’t think

she did, either. She told me some more about Luis,

and about the little girl. Did I know about her? I can’t

remember if you told me. God almighty, what is there

left to happen to that child? We need to see if we can

do anything for her.…”

“I’ll have to go,” I said, feeling a great, listless white

fatigue wash over me. “I’ll have to go over there.

Sometimes she’ll talk to me when she won’t to anybody

else. I don’t know if she can get over this, though…but

oh, Lord, Clay, I am just so tired.…”

“I know. You’re not going anywhere today. Tomor-

row, maybe. Carter’s coming in tonight and will be