It’s funny how a night’s sleep can change the complexion of things. I couldn’t have slept more than five hours, but when I finally got showered and dressed and in some sort of forward motion, the terrible night before had faded and bleached itself down to a kind of half-memory, half-dream that lacked the poisonous immediacy of the night itself. I knew it was something I had done myself, while I slept, in order simply to survive and go on; I had done it sometimes when the pain of Kylie got too overwhelming. It was a kind of interior litany that threaded my troubled sleep and bore me up when I waked: Well, it was awful; it was the worst thing in the world, but here it is the next day and we’re still here. The sun is still shining, the birds are still singing. It isn’t going to kill us, and what doesn’t kill us can only make us stronger. There’s still Clay and me, the fact of us. There’s still that.
I was so proficient at it that it was buried deep in my subconscious now, and I knew only that a night had passed and a day had been born and we were still intact. As long as we were, we could work this out. He had said so, hadn’t he? He had said they’d go back to the drawing board with ideas for Dayclear. He’d said we didn’t need to speak of it again until spring. It would take at least that long to come up with a better plan. I didn’t have to do anything at all about this until then. The light would have turned to pale, tender gold and the marshes would be greening up before I ever had to think of it.
I ran down the stairs two at a time, eager to be out in the crisp, clear light that flooded the back garden. I would have coffee there, and then cut the last of the roses and bring them in. Then I would go back over to the island. There was one more thing I had to do before I could pack the enormity of Dayclear away.
An hour later I stopped at the little unpainted cabin that had served the settlement as a general store and community center since I was a small child, to ask where Ezra Upchurch’s house was. I knew that Janie and Esau Biggins, who had kept the store almost that long, would know. They had served the settlement’s needs and wants and its deepest aches for forty years. And they were Gullahs, too, originally from Edisto. There was little about the people of Dayclear they did not know.
The vertical planks of the little house were blackened with age and weather, and several had rotted through. The roof was rusted tin and missing many squares. The listing porch held a long-defunct metal Nehi cooler that squatted stolidly in a corner, like an abandoned god. Usually someone sat on it, or a group played checkers or cards on its pitted surface, but the day was sharp, and I knew that everyone would be inside, clustered around the black iron stove that would surely, as my grandfather always said, burn the place down one day. A few chickens pecked and scratched in the swept dirt yard and under the porch. They were Domineckers; I had always admired their precise tweed dress and vaguely African demeanor. They seemed to me so much more exotic than the fat, complacent Rhode Island Reds, almost as picturesque as the beautiful, witless, pin-head guineas that sometimes foraged alongside them. These did not stop their noshing as I walked through them and up the steps.
Inside, the thick, rank semigloom smelled of smoke and licorice and the dusty peanuts in their shells in a big barrel by the counter, and something else darker and older: dried blood from the carcasses of the chickens that were slaughtered out back and sold. I felt a little uncomfortable, for I knew that mine would be the only white face, but I had been here before, many times, and I was known. I would be treated with courtesy because of my grandfather. He would have been treated with affection.
Janie was behind the counter this morning. She smiled her gold-toothed smile and nodded but did not speak. That was for me to do first, and I did.
“I’m looking for the house Ezra Upchurch is staying in, Janie,” I said. “He’s got someone staying with him, a Mr. Cassells, that I need to see.”
“Ezra, he stayin’ with his auntie down at the end of the row, but he ain’t to home,” she said equably. “Seem like he say he goin’ to town today.”
I did not know if “town” meant the village on Edisto or Charleston or what, but it did not matter, since it was Luis Cassells I wanted. I was glad that I would not have to say what I had to say to him in front of Ezra Upchurch. The great wind of Ezra’s presence would, I knew, overwhelm me. This was going to be hard enough.
“That’s okay. I’ll just walk on down there and see if Mr. Cassells is there. Thanks a lot,” I said.
“I’m here,” a masculine voice said from somewhere in the gloom behind the stove, and I peered into it. Luis Cassells was sitting in a spavined old rocking chair in the shadows, drinking coffee and smoking a large black cigar. Both smelled good, rich and masculine. They reminded me of my grandfather. There was a cardboard box beside him on the floor, and I heard a scuffling and scratching from it. Walking back, I peered in. There were three small black and tan hound puppies there, curled around one another. Luis was scratching their heads with the hand that held the cigar. He smiled up at me, his teeth flashing white in the murk.
“Pull up a chair,” he said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Or maybe you’d prefer a puppy. Esau’s trying to find homes for them. Their mama got run over on the bridge.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “If he can’t place them, I’ll put a notice in the office. Where’s Lita this morning?”
“Ezra’s auntie is teaching her how to wrap her hair. She’s been after me for a week to let her. Says that way I won’t have to comb it for days and days, and she won’t have to cry. She has a point. Combing hair is not one of my long suits.”
I smiled. Then I said, “Mr. Cassells…”
He raised an eyebrow at me and I felt myself blush, and was glad of the darkness.
“Luis,” I said. “I came to apologize. I was pretty crappy to you yesterday. And…you were right about Dayclear. There are some plans to develop it. I didn’t know about them. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen; I do own this part of the island, and if it seems to me that the property would harm the settlement in any way, it’s not going to happen. Clay and I have an agreement about that. I thought you might pass the word along. Nothing at all is going to be done until spring, and then only with their blessing.”
He studied me for a space of time.
“I see,” he said. “Well, that’s good to know. Why don’t you come on back with me and tell them yourself?”
“Because they’ll be more apt to believe it if it comes from you,” I said, knowing it was true. “They’re nice to me because of my grandfather, but I’m whitey all the same. We don’t have a great history of truth-telling in these parts. But you’re one of them. They’d trust you.”
He laughed, the big, rolling laugh I remembered.
“You’re right about that,” he said. “Nobody would confuse me with whitey.”
I blushed again, hard.
“I meant that you’re Ezra’s friend, staying in his house. That would be enough right there.”
“I know what you meant,” he said, still chuckling. “You’re right. They’ve taken me and Lita in like family, God bless them. I think it’s because I’ve traveled such a long road. These are people that know a thing or two about journeys.”
“You said you’d tell me about that road one day,” I said.
“I did, didn’t I? Well, since you honored me with an apology…completely unnecessary, by the way…the least I can do is honor you with the absolutely fascinating, never-equaled story of my life. Capsule version. That is, if you’ll quit hovering and sit down and drink coffee with me.”
I sat. He held up a finger and Janie brought two more cups of strong black coffee, smiling her gold-toothed smile as she did. It tasted strong and fresh and bitter, odd but good on this stinging day. I told her so.
“I puts a big ol’ lump of chic’ry in every pot,” she said.
Luis drained his second cup, set it down, and said, “Okay. Here we go. I was born…” And he grinned his pirate’s grin. “Don’t worry; it’s the abridged edition. I was born in Havana in 1939, or just outside it. My family was rich. My father was third in a line of doctors and gentlemen farmers, and we had what you all would call a country estate here. The finca, we called it. I was supposed to follow in the family tradition of medicine, but I hated everything about it, and by the time I was ready for college I knew that plants were going to be it for me. The old man was furious, but he had my younger brother already in the fold, so he paid for me to go to the university and start studying tropical botany. That was in 1957.
“I got married the same year. We do that in Cuba, or did, especially in the wealthy old families. She was the daughter of a neighbor; just as rich as we were, and I’d known her since we were in diapers. Her name was Ana, and she was little and round and soft like a dumpling, with the most wonderful giggle. All she ever wanted was to be married and have children and live exactly like the women in her family had lived for generations. And we got a good start on it; our daughter, Anita, was born the next year, 1958. Anita, little Ana. God, she was a pretty little girl. She looked like a Christmas angel.
“The next year Batista packed it in, on New Year’s Day, 1959, and the world we knew turned upside down. The revolution was supposed to be for all of us, but it was clear very soon that that didn’t include the quote, aristocrats, unquote. I could see what was coming, but my family never could, and Ana’s couldn’t, either. And her folks did a real number on her; when I begged her to bring the baby and come out with me, she wouldn’t do it. It was all going to blow over in a few months, she said. She would stay with her family on the estate and wait for me to get it all out of my system. Then we’d go on just as we’d planned. She wasn’t a stupid girl, but she was totally of her time and class, and she couldn’t imagine that anything could ever change, even after it did.
“So. I got out with a young uncle on a commercial fishing boat out of Miami, and I stayed with some relatives there. There are Cassells all over the place. These didn’t have half the money my folks did, but they were realistic about Cuba under Castro. They knew I couldn’t go back. They found a job for me in a little Cuban radio station and I sent home what I could. I never knew if any of it got there or not. I didn’t hear from Ana and the baby for almost a year, and by then things were pretty bad for all of them, my folks included. There wasn’t a prayer of Ana getting out while the baby was so small. She wouldn’t, anyway. Her family was in terrible shape, trying to do farm work for one of the cooperatives and dying from it. She wouldn’t leave them. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t going to see them again, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself.
“I went back to Cuba in April of 1961 with the invasion forces that the CIA trained in Florida and Guatemala. I was captured almost before I put a foot on the beach and spent a year and a half in prison down there. I try not to talk about that year and a half. They let me out just before Christmas of 1962, and I was going to go and find my family, but I was met at the gate by a friend of my family in Miami and taken straight to the harbor at midnight, and put in the hold of a sailing sloop that belonged to some rich German dude who knew my uncle. That was the last time I saw Cuba.
“In 1963 my uncle sent me to Cornell and I got a graduate degree in tropical botany. I finished in 1966, with about as much chance of making a living in my specialty as if it had been sword-swallowing. But I’d met some people and learned some things at Cornell, and those months in that prison made something of me I’d never been before. There was a guy in Miami then, a fantastic man named Jorge Mas Canosa, sort of the legendary king of the anti-Castro exiles. The word ‘charisma’ might have been invented just for him. He founded the anti-Communist Cuban American Foundation, headquartered in Miami. It was the daddy of all the anti-Communist movements. He modeled it after your American political action committees, and he raised a ton of money for the movement, and got out the exile vote for the Republicans year after year. He was the most alive human being I ever saw. I would have followed him into hell. In a way, I did.
“He couldn’t use a botanist, but he could a radio-TV announcer. He got me into Radio and TV Marti, his propaganda voice, which was nothing if not controversial in those days, and I just ate it up. I did everything. I read the news and played the music and kept the station logs and sold airtime and even had my own slot singing once, when we ran out of money and he couldn’t get anybody else. But then I started to drink, which was almost endemic in the exile community in those days, especially among the ones of us who’d been in the invasion and in prison. Big man stuff, you know. I was one of the ones who couldn’t handle it. It didn’t take me long to go the whole way down. I was born to be an alky. I make a better drunk than I do anything else, probably. I got so bad on the air that he didn’t have any choice but to fire me. Even I knew that. So I drifted around, doing landscape work and whatever radio and TV I could get. I didn’t hold on to any of it. I never remarried and I never stayed with any woman long enough to settle down. I was married to the bottle, and that’s no joke. I’ve done essentially that from the late seventies until now, only I’ve done the last eight years of it sober. I met Ezra in Charleston when he was speaking there, and he had this afternoon jazz and talk program on a station out on Wappoo Creek Road, and he put me on with him, and we played music and needled the conservatives and he let me help him with some of his organizing. I helped organize the sanitation workers on John’s. It was as big a thrill as I’ve ever had. But mostly I just do the radio program and what landscaping and consulting I can pick up.
“Like I said, I never went back to Cuba. There wasn’t anything to go back to, really. My parents tried to run a little shop in Havana, but of course they knew nothing about that. They checked out with sleeping pills and rum one night about the time I discovered booze over here. My wife’s folks ended up on one of Fidel’s biggest agricultural cooperatives, doing field labor until they dropped from it, and my wife worked in the fields, too. I only found this out later. She never would come out, not even when I found a fairly safe passage for her and Anita. Ana always thought things were about to change. Always did. Anita married a young man from the cooperative and went with him into the mountains to start a new agricultural colony there, but it failed after the first year. It’s hard to tell anybody just how bad things are up in those hills. Everybody was checking out right and left, but she was nine months pregnant and spotting, and she didn’t want to risk the baby. Her husband left with the others, saying he’d be back in a day or two with food and supplies, and after the baby came they’d go back to Havana and start over. I don’t know if Anita had any sense or not, but she was Ana’s child to the core, and she believed him. I don’t know what happened to him. I guess she didn’t, either. Dead, probably, from liquor or a fight, a lot of them died young. Anyway, he didn’t come back and she went into a long and awful labor alone in their little shack, and the baby was born dead. She lay there bleeding to death with Lita beside her. I never even knew I had a grandchild until after they were all dead but her. She was not quite five. She wouldn’t leave her mother and the baby. She just lay down beside them and waited. It was days before the Red Cross found her. They located my wife back in Havana and brought Lita to her, and that’s where she’s been until I could get her out, after Ana died. She wouldn’t let me bring Lita out before that. Still waiting for things to get back to normal, she was. I have no picture of my daughter but the one made at her christening, and I cannot remember what my wife looked like, except for a picture I have that was made on our wedding day. Well, you know the rest of it; I told you yesterday. So. Does that earn me the right to hear the story of Caro Venable, from gestation up to now?”
“One day,” I said, my eyes stinging with tears. “One day, maybe. My God, what a life. How could mine compete with that?”
“Are we having a competition? I tell you, Caro Venable, for all its comings and goings and ins and outs and so forth, the best thing I can say about my life up to now is that I beat booze and I have Lita. It doesn’t seem very much for the amount of energy expended, does it?”
“If that’s all you think a life like that adds up to, you’ve got a problem,” I said.
“It was a selfish life,” Luis said briefly. “When all’s said and done, I did just what I wanted to. Anyway, I have a feeling things are about to change.”
And he gave me such a showily exaggerated Latin leer that I could only laugh helplessly. If he had had a long, waxed mustache, he would have twirled it.
“I have to go home now,” I said. “I’ve hung on breathlessly to your every word, but now, alas, my own duties call me.”
“And are you impressed beyond words and moved almost to tears?”
“I’ll think upon it and let you know,” I said lightly, but inside I was both those things, and not ashamed of it, though I would never tell him so.
When he walked me to the car, he said, “Will you be staying out here? Lita is wild to see the ponies again.”
“I’ve got to do Thanksgiving for about a million homeless lambs,” I said, “but I’ll try to come out after the weekend, and we’ll track them down. How will I let you know?”
“I’ll know,” he said, bowing from the waist and kissing my hand. “I assure you, I’ll know.”
I shut the Jeep’s door a little more smartly than was necessary, and he went back into the store. As he walked away, I could hear him laughing his hyena’s laugh. I laughed, too. It felt good.
Two days before Thanksgiving, Jeremy Fowler walked down to the sea in Puerto Rico at four o’clock in the morning, sat down, and blew his brains out with a police .38 nobody knew he had. By noon we had the news on Peacock’s Island. By six o’clock that evening the company was in deep shock and full mourning.
Clay and Hayes flew down from Charleston that afternoon as soon as they could get a plane out. I went to the office and put a note on the front bulletin board and told a weeping Shawna to pass the word to everybody: our house was open for whomever wanted to come. There would be drinks and some supper, if anybody wanted it.
Almost everybody came. Most of those who had expected to go to their respective homes for Thanksgiving canceled their plans and drifted in, distraught and aimless. The two new couples had both left earlier in the week, but Sophia Bridges, who had not planned to go back to New York until Christmas, came. I was a little surprised at that. She had not known Jeremy, and knew few of the others; I had heard that she kept pretty much to herself and did not attend the formal and informal social occasions the company provides its employees. Shawna said, sniffling, that she seemed to prefer the company of her son to anybody else’s, and that that was probably a good thing, since nobody could find a baby-sitter that suited. The child was in the company’s modern day-care center when his mother was at work, but the rest of the time he was in her company. I wondered what she had done with him this evening. She had obviously come to our house in haste; her sleek black hair was disarrayed, and she still wore the slim jeans and sweatshirt she had obviously changed into when she got home that evening. Whoever she found for the boy would have to have been a last-minute solution.
I had asked Estelle to stay, and she had ordered groceries and made sandwiches and cheese straws and baked a ham while I went to the liquor store and picked up deli potato salad and a couple of carrot cakes from the little specialty pastry shop in the mall. Clay’s youngsters picked at the food, but they lit into the liquor as if they were dying of thirst. By eight that evening more than a few of them were slurring their words, and some were weeping aloud. I didn’t blame them. If it had not been the time and place that it was, I would have loved to have drunk bourbon and cried along with them. I had known Jeremy, too, and loved him, as they did. It had been impossible not to. I knew that the tears were not only for his death but for the sad, shocking trajectory of failure and waste that led up to it. The word flies fast in a close, ingrown company like Clay’s. Everyone there knew about the collapse of Calista Key. Most knew that it would be a severe blow to the company, although few if any could have known just how severe. Under the grief and incredulity was fear. Fear of what the catastrophe might mean to both the company and to them personally, and a deeper and older fear: the fear of the golden, vital young when the first and the best of them falls.
I moved among them, patting shoulders and kissing cheeks and hugging whoever held out their arms. Some of them are only ten or so years younger than I am, but they have always seemed like my children to me, or rather, like young kin that I do not see often but still feel a vague responsibility for. With the exception of Sophia Bridges, I have known them all for some time, and many for years. It was as easy and natural for me to mop tears and exchange funny or bittersweet fragments of remembrance about Jeremy as if we had all been students together or denizens of the same small town. The only thing I could not seem to share with them was the tears. Mine lay, clotted and swollen, just at the base of my throat, and would not fall. I remember wondering if I could not cry for Jeremy Fowler, who on earth would I ever weep for again?
In a way I was glad it was just me on this first evening. In deep distress Clay goes still and silent, and sometimes seems cold and correct but little more. This is not true, of course; inside he suffers and bleeds like everyone else. I have often thought of Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—when I think of Clay in grief. It is his only armor, and I bless it for what ever ease it may afford him, but others, the young especially, need to be wept with and held. I could do that or, at least, the latter. Clay could have done neither. Later was when his iron and stillness would serve them. And as for Hayes, it seemed to me that he could only gibe. This night was not the time for that.
By nine o’clock most of them had gone home to drink some more or drive the baby-sitters home, to sit up into the small, cold hours of the morning talking about it, to cry again, and finally to sleep. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the big silver urn and went over and sat down beside Sophia Bridges. She was sitting where she had been for most of the evening, alone on the white sofa beside the fireplace in the big living room that looks out to sea. I had forgotten to draw the curtains, and, following her gaze, could see the distant line of white lace that was the surf curling in on the dark beach. The fire had burned itself nearly out.
“I’m sorry I haven’t had more time to spend with you,” I said, sitting down on the arm of the sofa. “This has just about done us all in. Jeremy was something special. I wish you had known him.”
She smiled up at me faintly. Her face under the untidy hair seemed younger this evening, and softer. I thought perhaps it was because I had never seen her smile before.
“Oh, but I did,” she said. “I’ve heard nothing but Jeremy since I got here. By now I feel like I know him like I would know my brother. I think maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to come tonight, but I thought it would be worse if I didn’t. He was obviously a powerful icon. I didn’t want to seem to diss him.”
She smiled again, as if to show me that her use of the slang was intentional. Two smiles in one evening, back to back. Through the fatigue that suddenly swamped me, and the numb, dumb desire just to go to bed and sleep, I felt a small sting of sympathy for her. It is not easy in the best of circumstances to walk into the Peacock Island Plantation Company and be instantly accepted. How much harder it must be if you were black, alone, and known to be “the best of the lot.” I knew that I had seen no one in conversation with her for any length of time all evening.
“It was just the right thing to do,” I said. “They’ll all appreciate it when they’ve got a little perspective on this. I know it’s not so easy at first, getting your feet wet down here. It must seem like the other side of the moon from…where was it? New York?”
“New York; right,” she said, stretching her long arms and rotating them in their sockets. Even in the sweatshirt she looked as elegant as a Modigliani.
“We’ve lived in the Village since…for a couple of years. On Bleecker Street. A fabulous little carriage house; I was so lucky to find it. There was a woman next door…a lovely Swedish woman; she got to be a real friend…who came in and stayed with Mark every day. I wouldn’t have been able to finish my doctoral degree other-wise. I guess you can see why I was so hesitant about having an African-American woman stay with Mark. He’s never had one. For a long time I didn’t realize that he’s actually afraid of people with dark skins. Now I see that I was not only foolish to insist on that, but I was doing him actual harm. I need to apologize to you about that little remark, Mrs. Venable, among other things. When I’m scared I get snotty.”
“Call me Caro, please,” I said, liking her, all of a sudden, very much indeed. I could see precisely why she pulled isolation around her and her son like a cloak. She probably had few peers. How many young black women could imagine being where Sophia Bridges was in her life? How many young white women could imagine the life itself?
“You have absolutely nothing to apologize to me for,” I said. “As I said, there are a million things easier than walking into a tight little society that has existed quite nicely without you for a long time. They’ll come to you eventually; I’ve seen it happen over and over again. Though not many of them came here with reputations like yours preceding them. That may be part of the problem. Clay thinks you’re awfully special.”
The easy smile vanished and the remote Ibo princess was back. I knew that there would be no easy victories with this one. But it was good to know, too, that there were chinks in her armor.
“I’m glad to have his high opinion,” she said formally. “I’ve worked very hard for a long time to be special. It’s what I have now in place of friends or a nice house in Connecticut or a husband. In the long run, I’ve always known that when you’re black you’d better be special, because you can’t count on the rest of it. It’s something I want Mark to learn young. But you were right that first day; he has to live in the world he finds himself in. My baby-sitter tonight is an African-American woman, and he was doing fairly well when I left him. He’d almost stopped sniffling. She’s as old as his grandmother, and she’s lighter than me.”
“Well, good,” I said, unsure whether it was the right thing to say or not. Was that going to be her criteria? Black women might tend her son only if they were mulatto matrons? I wondered if she had ever seen the movie Six Degrees of Separation.
She made no move to leave, and declined coffee or a bite to eat or another glass of wine. So I hauled myself up by my mental bootstraps and said, “How is your work going? Clay said you had a degree in cultural anthropology; are you finding it useful here?”
“Yes, that was my master’s,” she said. “Up to now I’ve mainly been doing orientation, and you know of course that that’s the same for everybody. I’m starting now to research the Gullah culture, though. I’m going into Charleston to the library next week. It should have something. I understand that there are several neighborhood units in this area, almost intact. It would be interesting to tie that in with the new development somehow; I think a lot of prospective home-owners would find that sort of ethnicity an attractive part of the whole picture. It would give such texture and resonance to the package.…”
I thought of the dilapidated little gray houses in Dayclear, warm with pine and kerosene lamplight against the winter twilight, and the sweet, liquid, and nearly incomprehensible music of the Gullah tongue that was still sometimes spoken over on the island, and about the immense dignity and beauty of the old faces I knew from there. They would be amazed to know that they could be considered texture and resonance. My liking for her faded. I realized that I would love nothing more than to take her out to the settlement and fling her into the middle of it and leave her floundering there among her theories and pretensions.
“Then you should really come with me someday soon to my part of the island, back on the marshes,” I said. “I spent most of my summer vacations there, in my grandfather’s house, and the house is still mine…ours. There’s one of the oldest Gullah…ah, units in the Lowcountry near there, a little settlement called Dayclear. Why go to the library when you can go to the source?”
“Clay mentioned something about Dayclear,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was actually part of the island. That would be a real opportunity for me, Mrs. Venable…Caro. I could take my tape recorder and a camera, and I’d love for Mark to see something like that in situ. Could we take you up on it soon?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, baring my teeth in a smarmy smile. “We can go early next week, if you like. I’m tied up with this Thanksgiving oyster roast thing, but maybe the Monday or Tuesday after that?”
“I’ll put it down,” she said. In another five minutes she was gone and Estelle and I put the kitchen to rudimentary rights, then I sent her home and went up to my little study and fell asleep almost before I hit the daybed.
It was nearly a week later before I got Sophia Bridges and her son, Mark, over to the island. Late on Thanksgiving evening our crisp weather gave way to a long spell of fog and murk, with occasional fretful spatters of rain. Despite the company’s advertising brochures, our late fall weather is seldom anything to cheer about; it is the start of our tenacious fits of sulking humidity that the Gulf exhales all across the deep South. Lingering leaves and moss hang sodden and sticky at eye level; doors swell and shoes go furry gray-green in closets, for the temperature is not cool enough for heat and too cool for air-conditioning. The air is the color and consistency of veal stock. If we are lucky, this climactic tantrum will run itself out a couple of weeks before Christmas, and those holidays will be bright and crisp and mild, the stuff of rhapsodic letters home from vacationing Canadians. Christmas is the true time of the snowbird, the season of the blue-fleshed but determined ocean bather, but we had a few of them even over our soggy Thanksgiving weekend. I saw them from the living room windows and was doubly grateful that Clay had canceled the Thanksgiving oyster roast. The weather, coupled with the painful knowledge that it was on a Peacock Island Plantation Company beach that Jeremy Fowler had made his final exit, put paid to any notion that a seaside revel could be enjoyed. Instead, we had everybody back to our house and used the oysters as on-the-half-shell appetizers, and Estelle and her niece and I cooked four turkeys and panfuls of corn bread and pecan dressing and made enough gravy to float a catamaran. By the time the last of our guests drifted home, I was drooping and stupid from fatigue. Clay kissed me on the top of the head, sent Carter to take Estelle and Gwen home, and pointed me upstairs to bed.
“I owe you for these past four days,” he said. “You’ve fed and succored my flock twice now. I’m going to start cleaning up. Carter can help me when he gets back. You sleep in tomorrow. Don’t get up till you wake up.”
“You’re walking on your knees yourself,” I said, and it was true. His narrow face was actually sunken with fatigue and strain, and his crystal-blue eyes were dull. I knew the trip to Puerto Rico had been terrible for him. Jeremy’s shattered parents had come from Texas, savagely seeking somewhere to lay the blame for their pain, and word had come that Lila Fowler had collapsed back in Philadelphia and been hospitalized at a discreet and prodigiously expensive private institution that specialized in treatment for substance addiction. Lila, it turned out, had been eating Percodan like after-dinner mints and washing them down with 150-proof Mount Gay rum. Her parents were threatening legal action. On top of his very real grief for Jeremy and the specter of the company’s collapse, I wondered how Clay could bear it all.
But he insisted.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I’d just toss and turn. Let me do this. I need to talk over some things with Carter, anyway.”
“Does he know…about the company?” I asked.
“Yes. I told him when I went to pick him up in Charleston. He took it better than I thought. In fact, it seems to be a challenge for him. He had some pretty good ideas right off the bat. He wants to stay here after this semester is over and help out, and I think I’ll let him. He might as well get his feet wet now as later, and a real crisis is not the worst way to learn a business. Everything after it will look awfully good.”
“Well…if you think so,” I mumbled, hoping that there would be an after. “I’d like for him to go on and finish school, but it’s nice that he wants to come home and help you show the flag. It’ll be wonderful to have him around.”
“Well, actually, he’s going to be in Puerto Rico,” Clay said. “There’s a lot of mopping up to do, and I thought he could take care of some of that for Hayes and me. We’ve got our hands full here and in Atlanta.”
“Have they…have the Atlanta people gone back?” I said, not wanting to talk about it but feeling that I must ask. It was, after all, his future. His and mine.
“Yep. They weren’t very happy about us wanting to go back to the drawing board, but they want this project awfully bad. They’re willing to give us a couple of months to come up with something else. Then we’ll see where we are.”
“Clay…” I said, going to him and laying my head against his shoulder, “thank you for that. Thank you for trying again. Thank you for…not making me the heavy in this, and for not making me deal with it quite yet. I’ll do better about it a little later, I promise. I just…I can’t…”
“I know,” he said, sighing into my hair. “Go to bed.”
And for the next three days, I slept, off and on, as though I had been drugged. When I finally did wake up enough to know that I was slept out, it was the following Sunday evening, and the rain was still falling. So it was not until the Wednesday after that that Sophia and Mark and I set out in the Cherokee to see the Gullahs of Dayclear, as Sophia had said, in situ.
It had faired off clean and crisp, but the ground was still waterlogged, and I knew the marshes would be a virtual soup. I wore the oldest jeans I had, and an ancient waxed cotton waterproof jacket, and the over-the-ankle L.L. Bean rubber boots that had been my winter marsh footwear for a decade. They were so salt-bleached and mud-caked that it was impossible to tell what color they had been. When I picked the two Bridgeses up at their smart little condominium in the harbor village, Sophia wore a linen safari suit almost the precise color of her skin and a smart felt Anzac hat. She was strung about with expensive leather cases holding cameras, a tape recorder, and a bottle of Evian. She looked, I thought, like Ava Gardner in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Her little boy looked like a miniature Michael Jackson.
“I’m not kidding,” I told Lottie later. “He’s so sort of carved and delicate and perfect that he doesn’t seem alive, and he’s paler than most white children; if it weren’t for a slight crinkle to his hair, you’d think he was Norwegian or something. And his eyes are this strange ice gray. I’m sure his father is white. But the real thing that stops you is this incredible air of…I don’t know, fragility. Otherworldliness. He reminded me of Colin in The Secret Garden. He looks like he might have been ill most of his life. And he’s so shy it seems like outright fear. He stood behind his mother the entire day, almost, and he didn’t speak a word until it was almost time to leave the island. And I saw him smile exactly once. I’d love to know what’s going on there. If he’s that frail, no wonder she guards him like a lioness. I keep looking for the right word for him, and I almost have it sometimes, but it gets away.…”
“Fey,” Lottie said.
“Fey…yes. But, Lottie, that means…”
“Doomed. Soon to die. I know.”
“Well, I didn’t get that impression; I don’t think he’s sick. He just looks like he might have been. But yes, that’s the word.…”
It was a long time before I could think of little Mark Bridges in any other terms but “fey.”
He sat silently and correctly on the backseat of the Cherokee as I drove us over the bridge to the island, and got out at the house when his mother told him to, but he stuck just behind her, and his eyes, as he took in the old gray and silver live oak grove the house stood in, and the vast sweep of the lion-colored marsh, and the tangle of silent green that was the river forest beyond it, were wide and white-rimmed. I did not think he had often been in places like this. Nor, it was apparent, had Sophia.
“It’s stunning,” she said. “Primeval, really, isn’t it? We’ve been to several beaches around New England, but there are no marshes there, and nothing as wild as this. Look, Mark, see that big white bird? I’ll bet they have birds like that in Africa.” Turning to me, she said, “We plan a photo safari to Kenya when Mark is a little older. This will be a good start for him.”
But I did not think Mark Bridges would be ready for Kenya anytime soon. The marshes of Peacock’s Island seemed to intimidate him thoroughly. He took hold of the edge of his mother’s jacket and did not let go until we had gone into the house. Then he sat on the sofa that faced away from the glass window wall, sipping the apple juice his mother had brought in one of her assorted leather pouches, and did not look at the marsh.
Sophia did not prod him to be more adventurous, or try to explain his timidity, as many other mothers might have done, and I liked her for that. This kind of fear, I thought, could only be healed by the boy himself. He would find his own talisman against it, or not.
“The place where we’re going isn’t so wild, Mark,” I said to him. “It’s a regular little village, where people have lived for a long, long time. There are little houses, and a store, and a tiny little church they call a pray house. I don’t think there are many children, but I know of one who might be around. She’s about your age, and she’s a little Cuban girl, from a country way down south in the ocean below Florida. She may not be there, though; she goes out with her grandfather a lot. He’s a very special kind of gardener, and he works all over the island. But the old people there know some wonderful stories and songs. Maybe they’ll sing some for you. And there’s a little herd of ponies somewhere close by, and one of them has a baby. Maybe we’ll see them.”
Mark edged a little closer to his mother. Apparently ponies were not a part of his special reality.
“We had a rather bad little scene with a horse in Central Park,” Sophia said matter-of-factly. “I’d rather Mark didn’t experience horses again until later.”
“Well, these are very small horses, and quite shy,” I said. “But I doubt we’ll see them. They don’t hang around the village much. How about chickens? Is he okay with them? They’re all over the place in Dayclear.”
“He’s seen them at the Central Park petting zoo,” she said. “I think he’ll be fine with them, if nobody talks about eating them. He gets upset when he thinks he’s eating anything that was alive.”
“Well, I hope we don’t come across anybody wringing a hen’s neck for the pot,” I said more crisply than I intended. I was getting a bit weary of this pair and their strange, self-constructed universe.
“Surely they don’t do that,” Sophia said, clearly disapproving.
“Sophia,” I said carefully, “this is a real Gullah settlement, one of the longest-standing that I know of. They are quite isolated. They still live much the way they did a hundred years ago. They sing the old songs that originally came from Africa, and do the old dances, and tell the old stories, and raise their food and prepare it much the same way as they always have. They are quite poor by our standards, but they are self-sufficient and they do very well with what they have, all told. Their lifestyle is not the sanitized one we live. They kill chickens and they trap rabbits and they eat them. If that’s a problem for Mark—and I can see why it might be; that’s not a criticism—then maybe we should do this another day when he’s in school or something. You can let him experience it gradually and it will probably be okay.”
She stared at me, as if to determine whether or not I was, indeed, implying criticism, and then shook her elegant head. Her hair today was sleeked back and tied with a leopard-printed chiffon scarf. The hat hung down her back from a cord.
“No. It’s an authentic ethnic culture, and I don’t want him to be afraid of that,” she said. “We’ll talk about it all, he and I, when we get home and make a little parable of it. We do that a lot.”
We finished our coffee and Mark his apple juice, and went down the steps toward the Cherokee, to set off for Dayclear. Just as we reached the bottom one, a great grinding roar burst into the clearing, and a spuming cloud of fine black mud swept, tornadolike, down the sandy drive, and we heard, over the roaring, shouts and catcalls and huge, raucous laughter. A hurtling shape burst out of the mud spray and I saw what it was: a great black motorcycle with two men astride it. They were shouting and beating on the sides of the machine, and laughing, looking for all the world like demented gods on a terrible deus ex machina. They were singing, too; under the bellowing motor I made out the roared words to John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillen: “‘I was walking down Hastings Street/I saw a little place called Henry’s Swing Club/Decided I’d stop in there that night/And I got down…’”
We stood frozen on the steps. The motorcycle swept into the yard and past us, missing us by what seemed inches. It roared out of the yard, made a circle, and came burring down on us again. The two men called greetings and laughed loudly. I could not make them out for the fantail spray of wet black mud.
Mark Bridges made a high, strangled sound like the squeak of a rabbit caught in a snare and threw himself down on the steps and rolled into a ball. Sophia hurtled off the bottom step like a missile. She ran into the path of the motorcycle and stood there, fists balled, screaming with fury. I could not seem to move.
“Stop that, you sons of bitches!” she shrieked. “Can’t you see you’ve scared my child to death? Stop it this second or I’ll get the police on you!”
The motorcycle skidded to a stop. The silence rang like a brass gong. Sophia did not move. The two men dismounted and came toward her slowly. I recognized Luis Cassells first, mud-spattered and windblown, his big, dark face crestfallen. Then I saw that the other man was Ezra Upchurch. He was even more mud-slimed and wind-savaged, but one would have known that squat, tanklike build and the massive, overhanging brow and the perfect blue-black of his skin almost anywhere. Practically every man, woman, and child in America had seen it in newspapers and on television since the late seventies.
“Jesus, lady, I almost hit you,” he said, and the beautiful, coffee-rich voice seemed as familiar as a neighbor’s, because I had heard it so often over the air.
“You almost hit my son, too, you complete, capering asshole,” Sophia spat, and I gasped, simply because the words were so at odds with her chilly elegance.
“What’s the matter with you that you think you can come roaring in here on that thing and run children down? Mark is a sensitive child; it’s going to take me days to get him calmed down! I’m of a good mind to report you to the authorities and to Clay Venable. If you aren’t aware of it, this is his land you’re trespassing on. I happen to work for him, and this lady happens to be his wife.”
Ezra Upchurch looked down at the crouched ball on the steps that was Mark Bridges. I had sat down beside him and put my arms around him, and I could feel the profound trembling that shook him like an ague.
“I’m sorry,” Ezra Upchurch said. “I didn’t see the boy. I know whose land this is, ma’am. Hello, Caro. Haven’t seen you since you were in training bras. Come a long way, I see. Ma’am, my name is Ezra Upchurch—”
“I know who you are,” Sophia said. “It doesn’t make you any less an asshole.”
Luis Cassells laughed.
“She’s got you pegged, Ezra,” he said. “Caro, I apologize. This is my fault. Shem was crabbing under the bridge when you came over and when we stopped to talk to him he said he’d seen you come this way with a…real fine-looking young lady. He didn’t say anything about the boy. We wouldn’t have scared him for the world. We were just…having fun.”
“Oh, God, Luis,” I said, my heart still hammering. “You could have killed somebody. Mrs. Bridges is new with the company, and I was about to bring her over to Dayclear. She’s doing…some research for Clay. But I think maybe we ought to get the little boy home.…”
Ezra Upchurch walked close to Sophia Bridges. His coal-black eyes, lost in ridges of pouched flesh and a network of fine wrinkles, lingered on her, taking in the exquisite carved face and the long, slender body and the safari outfit.
“I do apologize,” he said. “Let me make it up to your boy…”
He started for the steps, where Mark had begun to sob. He did not move to uncoil himself from the anguished ball. Through the silky fabric of his little Shetland sweater I could feel his heart going like a trip-hammer.
Sophia Bridges moved like a cat. In a split second she stood in front of her son on the bottom step.
“If you touch my son I’ll scratch your eyes out,” she said in the cold, pure voice I had first heard at the guest house. “That’s before I call the police.”
He stopped and studied her. Then he smiled. It was a lazy, insinuating, completely sexual smile. I felt its sheer wattage even though it was not directed at me.
“Unnnh…uh!” he drawled. “What we got here?”
The lapse into street black was as deliberate as a pinch or a leer. Sophia Bridges’s face blanched with fury.
I stepped in then.
“Sophia, there are chocolate chip cookies and fresh milk in the fridge, and the coffee’s still hot,” I said. “Why don’t you take Mark in and give him some, and I’ll just say good-bye to these two…gentlemen. I agree with you, they were foolhardy, but I know they didn’t mean any harm. Mr. Cassells here has a granddaughter that he dotes on; you know, the little Cuban girl I was telling Mark about. And Mr. Upchurch was born and grew up in Dayclear. If you can find it in your heart to forgive him, he can tell you almost anything you might want to know about it. You couldn’t have a better tour guide. He knows things I never will.”
She said nothing but lifted her child up and carried him bodily into the house. I would have thought his weight, frail as he was, would be too much for her slender arms, but she carried him easily. I could hear Mark still sobbing into her shoulder, but it seemed to me that the sobs were growing fainter. Sophia did not look back.
“I thought maybe the little boy might like a nice, slow ride on the cycle,” Ezra Upchurch said, pitching it just loudly enough for Sophia and Mark to hear. “The kids in Dayclear love it.”
“Over my dead body,” she flung back over her shoulder.
But Mark lifted his strange, tear-drowned little face for a moment and looked at Ezra Upchurch, and then at the motorcycle, before lowering it again to his mother’s shoulder. Ezra made the old peace sign with his fore and middle fingers and smiled broadly at the boy. That smile had bent tougher spines than Mark Bridges’s. Just before he tucked his face back into its nest of expensive Armani khaki, I thought I caught the faintest ghost of an answering smile.
I stood looking at the two men.
“Good work, guys,” I said. “Maybe she won’t call the police, but she’s going to tell Clay, sure as gun’s iron.”
“Not Mengele! Oh, no,” quavered Luis Cassells, and I glared at him.
“I’ll take my chances,” Ezra Upchurch said equably. “Look, I am sorry, Caro. I guess she’s got a right to be pissed. What’s the matter with that boy, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe he’s been sick. And he’s a long way from home, and he probably misses his father. They’re divorced. She’s pretty protective of him.”
“She’s pretty, period,” he said, grinning. “But that mama is way too much mama for me. Whoo-eee!”
Then he fell back into the perfect, Harvard-inflected English that was one of his hallmarks.
“I hope you’ll persuade her to bring the boy on over to Dayclear,” he said. “I’d like to make this up to both of them. If it’s…ah, research I believe you said…that she’s after, I’d be delighted to play cicerone for her. You, too. I’d like to catch up with you. I know what you’ve been doing since I saw you last, but not how you feel about it. Will you try to change her mind?”
“I will, but don’t count on it,” I said.
But to my surprise, Sophia Bridges decided to go on to Dayclear. When I got inside she was sitting with Mark at the kitchen counter drinking coffee while he finished his milk and cookies, and both of them were neatened and brushed and face-washed and composed again.
“Mark has decided he wants to go,” she said. “So we will. We’ll leave now. But I’m adamant that I don’t want that motorcycle anywhere around. I must insist on that, Caro.”
“I’m sure Ezra can hide it in the swamp or something,” I said, amused and not a little annoyed at her peremptoriness.
She stared at me hard.
“He better do that,” she said without smiling, and I sighed, and we left for Dayclear.