Ever since I was a small child I have had the fancy that, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, time somehow stops. I knew then and know now, of course, that each day wheels past at its appointed pace, but it has never seemed to me that it is real time that passed. That strange, glittering, suspended time seems swung between two realities: it belongs to no sober workaday chronology that I know. It is, in effect, the Washington, D.C., of the calendar year. And so it was with this holiday season. I walked lightly and carefully in that bubble of timelessness and thought neither behind me nor ahead, and was for the interval oddly happy.
I did not really forget what had happened to the company and more particularly and terrible to Jeremy Fowler, but I found that I could put it away for the nonce. And there was no forgetting the heavy sword that dangled over Dayclear and my island, but I did not have to remember it until after the holidays were over. This gift of suspended time was one of the sweetest and most unanticipated that I have ever received. I was as awed and delighted with it as a child with a wonderful, unexpected present. And for that period I behaved, I believe, more like a child than I have since I was one myself, or my children were. I was sometimes shamefully silly when Carter and Kylie were very young, but the silliness went, as did so much else, with my daughter, down into the sea. Now it was back. I indulged it gratefully. I would, I promised myself, shape up and buckle down to my real life on the second of January.
I dragged home an enormous Frasier fir tree from the island nursery and put it up in front of the glass windows in the big living room and spent an entire day decorating it with the cartons of ornaments and lights we had stored when I took to having smaller, more understated trees and putting them in the small library that overlooked the back garden. After Kylie I could not seem to bear the thought of those tender, annunciatory lights shining on that black sea. No one had ever mentioned it, but when Clay saw the tree, and when Carter came home from Puerto Rico and first spied it, their faces lit in a way that told me the loss of the big tree had been hurtful. My heart smote me. Selfish; I had never even thought of that.
And since we had the tree up anyway, I had an open house and asked everybody we’d ever known in the Charleston area, or almost, and was surprised and gratified that almost all of them came. It was an old-fashioned party; I had eggnog and Charleston Light Dragoon Punch and benné seed cake and my grandmother’s fruitcake, and Estelle made divinity and peanut candy, but there was little on my buffet that was sophisticated or clever. Looking over my food list, I saw that I was indeed having a children’s party, and so I moved the time to four in the afternoon and invited the children of my guests, and a great many of them came, too.
The party was such a success that many people suggested we make it an annual occasion.
“Of course,” I replied, and “Why not?”
Next year was so far outside my bubble of now that it need not even be reckoned with. In the meantime, the assorted children darting and shrieking around the tree and through the living room and out onto the lawn gave our house the air of a Lord & Taylor Christmas window, and that is how I chose to regard it. We had recordings of the traditional carols, and small presents for the children, and there was enough laughter and singing to fill the vast cave of the living room, for once, to its eaves. When dusk fell and the lights of the tree swam in their underwater radiance against the darkening sea and sky, only living children were reflected in my wall of windows. If a small shade joined them, I resolutely did not see.
I was truly moved to see how much Clay enjoyed the party. I did not realize until I saw him laughing with his guests and their children how quiet he had become, how far into himself he had drawn. I was accustomed to Clay’s going away inside his own head when there was a new project on his drawing board, but only when he emerged into our Christmas world, blinking and smiling, did I see that there had been a quality of somberness, almost of mourning, in his abstraction. Of course there was Jeremy, and the great peril that hung over the company, but I knew this was more, and I knew what it was. But I did not have to deal with it for the time being. It was enough that I had Clay back. I was determined to keep him as long as I could.
So we became social butterflies, something I, at least, had never been. We went to every party we were asked to; there was hardly a reception or open house or cocktail or dinner party from Georgetown to Beaufort that we did not attend. Sometimes, if the drive was long, we stayed over, either with friends or at an inn. We had done that so seldom in our marriage that it was festive and somehow erotic to me to wake up beside my husband in a pretty eighteenth-century bedroom that was not mine, with breakfast made by someone else waiting for us when we chose to come down. We slept late, ate heartily of shrimp and grits and oysters in every imaginable style and creamed seafood in patty shells and crab cakes according to the receipts of a dozen Charleston grandmothers, and we danced, and we even sang a little when someone played a piano in the late evenings or with the car radio, riding home on the black, deserted roads, with the cold Christmas moon silvering the marshes alongside us. I had not heard Clay sing since we were young marrieds; it simply did not seem to occur to him. He smiled often, now, and laughed outright more than he had in what seemed to me years. Whenever I glanced over at him, at a party or on one of the moon-flooded drives home, I caught him looking at me with something in his eyes that had not been there in a long time.
I never wanted those suspended days to end.
On impulse we spent Christmas in Key West, meeting Carter there when he came in from Puerto Rico, and it was an eccentric, sweet, indolent time. I had a heady, sweetheart-of-the-regiment feeling the entire three days, with the two tall blond men on either side of me everywhere I went, and the hot sun beating down on my bare head and shoulders. It was strange and funky and so tropical as to be safe, for there was no shard of Christmases past to sting and cut me. For the past five years, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day had been dead times for me. But this one was raffish, excessive, and totally alive. I thought that this would be what we must do each year from now on, though the thought of future Christmases seemed entirely unreal to me.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s we went to a party at Hayes and Lucy’s house on Church Street. It had been Hayes’s notion to invite his oldest friends, those who had grown up with him and gone to Virginia with him and Clay, and so we were surrounded with many of the people I had first met even before Clay and I married, the handful of couples who had been my first real “crowd,” and who had remained so until our children started to come and we moved away from one another. Almost everybody came, for everyone loves to visit Charleston, and Hayes had taken a block of rooms at a nearby inn and footed the bill as his Christmas present to his guests. If I wondered how on earth he could afford it, I did not wonder long. Hayes’s finances belonged outside the bubble. Inside there was only room for the funny, lost young Hayes who had brought Clay to me on a hot summer day, out of a blinding glitter of dying sunlight.
Hayes and Lucy’s house is one of the big old Charleston double houses, which means that it is two rooms wide instead of one, and very long. Its upstairs and downstairs piazzas were hung with garlands of smilax and holly, and tinsel and tiny white Christmas lights studded the crape myrtle trees and the lower branches of the live oaks that hung over the garden. It was a crisp night, too chilly to be outside, but we went out at midnight to sing carols, and the sound of our whiskey-sweet voices climbing into the night sky over the old vine-covered back garden walls of Church Street, and the clouds of frosty breath on which the songs floated, and the yellow flames of candlelight from neighboring windows all made that night as enchanted as if it had fallen in Avalon. I stood in a circle with these people who had been my first friends as a married woman, who had been young with me, our arms around one another’s waists and shoulders, and thought that if I should have to die suddenly, I would not be sorry if it was on a night like this. It was a seductive enough thought to frighten me, and I went back into the house and asked Hayes for another old-fashioned. Looking back, I see that I drank a lot in those days of the bubble, but it was not as it was in other times. I never seemed to get tipsy at all.
We stayed over with Hayes and Lucy that night, and made hilarious and silent love in their high-ceilinged old guest room, under an embroidered coverlet that had come, Lucy said, with one of her forebears from England in the time of the Lord Proprietors. I think, though, that she exaggerated; Clay and I gave the coverlet a rather muscular workout and it was still intact in all its silky shabbiness in the morning. We laughed a great deal that night, silently, with our hands over our mouths, for our bedroom was just down the hall from Hayes and Lucy’s, and neither of us felt like listening to Hayes’s sly insinuations at breakfast. It was very late when we finally lay still and sliding toward sleep, and Clay said, “I wish this night would never end.”
I traced my finger along his bare chest. It was slick with cooling sweat.
“I do, too,” I said, feeling tears prick my eyes and blinking them back. “Oh, I do, too.”
In all that spangled and fragile country there was one place that I could not go, and that was to the house on the island. I did not even try. I was afraid, and knew it clearly, and knew what I feared: both that in the long, still nights I would hear the laughter and voice of my dead child, and that I would not. The mere thought of sitting alone all night in that darkened living room overlooking the creek—for I knew that I would not sleep—made me break out in a cold sweat at my hairline. One way or another, the island house was haunted for me now.
Oh, I could go in the daytime for a little while, and did once or twice, but soon I stopped even that. The winter dark came down too soon. The silence that I had so loved waited too breathlessly for sounds that could not come…or could, and bring madness with them. I knew this notion of mine was not rational. I would, I resolved, deal with it as I could with all the other things that bumped like sharks at the aquarium wall of my bubble, after the holidays. But I missed the island, and I found that I missed the ponies and Lita and even Luis Cassells in some unexplored way. So I filled the days that remained to me inside the bubble with activity, from first light to long after dark. I polished silver, washed windows, cleaned out long-neglected closets, took curtains and drapes to be cleaned, attacked the neglected winter garden with a vengeance. It pleased and soothed me, somehow, to feel with my fingers the lares and penates of my marriage and my life with Clay, to tend them, to put them away renewed and shining. I sang as I tended and counted my treasures.
One morning toward New Year’s I was preparing to leave the nursery with a trunkful of new rose cuttings and ran into Luis Cassells. It was a raw day, with wisps of the morning’s fog still curling among the ocean pines and clinging in heavy droplets to the moss, and he wore a hooded sweatshirt and thick-soled boots caked with the black mud of the marsh. He had two enormous sacks of fertilizer in his big arms, and he grinned around them when he saw me.
“Miz Mengele!” he yelled across the parking lot. “Happy holidays to you and yours!”
Heads turned toward me, and my face reddened. I could feel it. At the same time I felt the corners of my mouth tug upward, and a laugh start low in my throat. He was outrageous and incorrigible, and I had missed him.
“And to you and yours,” I called back, and went over to the Peacock Plantation pickup truck, where he was storing the fertilizer. “Have you had a good Christmas?”
“You ask a Jew that?” He laughed. “Oh, hell, what chance does a poor lone Jew have down here? We had an old-fashioned Dayclear Christmas, and that, my lady, is some kind of Christmas indeed. A combination of Southern Baptist and Kwanza and Hanukkah, with a little Anglican and Disneyland thrown in. We cooked and ate for three days, and went to a Christmas Eve watch service and shouted and sang until dawn, and Ezra cooked a wild turkey somebody shot illegally and gave him, and Auntie Tuesday made hoppin’ John and cooked seven thousand pounds of yams, and I made black beans and rice to go with it, and Sophia ordered bagels and lox from the H&H deli in New York for Christmas breakfast, and Lita and Mark threw up three times apiece on Christmas Day. It was totally satisfactory.”
I lifted my eyebrows.
“Sophia and Mark?”
He grinned; with only his face showing under the tight-drawn hood, I thought that he looked like a werewolf.
“Well, nobody else asked her for Christmas. Ezra thought it was the only neighborly thing to do.”
“Oh, Lord,” I said, aghast. “I thought surely she’d be going back to New York for the holidays. I should have checked; it’s sort of my job to see that all the office crowd has somewhere to go for holidays. I just got busy, and then we went to Key West…I’ll call her this morning and apologize.”
“I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “Looked to me like she had a great time. Oh, she showed up in some kind of suede jumpsuit thing and high-heeled boots that cost more than Auntie’s house, and she still isn’t used to brushing a chicken off wherever she wants to sit down, but she’s learning. She’s learning. She makes careful notes on everything that happens in her little leather Day-Timer, and she’s about to run everybody crazy with that tape recorder and camera, and she still talks about ‘the Gullah experience’ and ‘the oral tradition’ and a pile of shit nobody can understand, but she’s Ezra’s guest and they’re getting used to her, and nobody gets ruffled up about her much anymore. And they love the little boy. He used to cry whenever somebody touched him, and it took him four or five visits to start talking, but he’s jabbering a blue streak now. Lita has taken him under her wing. In another month they’ll both be little Gullah younguns.”
“Four or five visits…she goes over there often then,” I said. Somehow I simply could not see it, remote, elegant Sophia Bridges spending her days in the hardscrabble clutter and the warm, smoky funk of Dayclear.
“She’s come almost every day,” Luis said. “She’s taking her assignment from Mengele very seriously, whatever it is. She says only that she’s studying the culture under his auspices and with his blessings. I don’t ask her anymore what she aims to do with her newfound knowledge, or what he does. You’ll notice I’m not asking you, either.”
“I really don’t know,” I said, feeling the walls of the bubble quiver perilously. “And I’m not going to ask Clay. You know what I told you, about them coming up with a better plan…for everything. I’m sure Sophia’s research is part of that, but beyond that I just—”
“—don’t know,” he finished for me. “Ah, yes. Well. Come and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me what you do know. I promise not to ask you anything else about the island except why you haven’t been over there lately. We’ve been looking for you almost every day. Lita is driving me crazy about the ponies, but I’m not going to take her to see them without you along, and besides, I haven’t seen them or their calling cards for a while.”
I hesitated, but then I went with him to the chic little coffee shop on the traffic circle nearby. We took our cups to a corner table and he pulled the hood off his big head and was the Luis Cassells I knew again, half mythic creature and half lowland gorilla. His hours in the winter sun had kept him walnut brown, and his teeth flashed piratically in the dimness of the little shop. I saw a face I knew at a table across the room and sighed. Shawna would be in Clay’s office within the hour, smiling archly and twittering about seeing me having a little coffee date with the hired help. I did not care if Clay knew, but I hated the smirk on Shawna’s proprietary face and hoped devoutly that Hayes was not around when she told Clay.
“So why haven’t we seen you?” he said matter-of-factly. “What’s the matter?”
“Why does something have to be the matter?” I said, annoyed. “I’ve just been busy. Christmas is always a zoo down here, and then we went to Key West over Christmas Eve and Day, and there have been a bunch of parties in Charleston.…”
“Ah, I forgot. Miz Mengele is a social lioness. Of course. The Charleston parties.”
His grin widened evilly. I could not remember if I had told him how I hated parties or not, but I knew that he knew somehow that I did.
“It’s the only time of the year I go to them,” I said defensively, and then laughed aloud. “Though why I’m explaining myself to you I do not know.”
“Why, indeed?” he said, and then his smile faded. “What is wrong, Caro?” he said, and the softness in his voice startled me so that I told him.
“And you’re afraid you’ll hear your daughter in the night? Or see her?” he said, when I fell silent.
“I’m more afraid that I won’t, I think,” I said helplessly, at a loss as to how to make him understand and wishing I had not spoken of it. “Or that I will, and that she’ll just…fade away then. That would be worse than not seeing her, but either of them just seem like more than…I could bear right now. I know it’s stupid. I know I need to get myself over this.”
“It’s not stupid. But you do need to get yourself over it. Not only does it hurt you in more ways than I think you know, it dishonors your child. She should not be the agent of your fear. She would not want to drive you from the place you and she loved so.”
“I know,” I whispered, feeling tears but knowing dully that they would not, could not, fall.
“I feel responsible,” he said presently. “It was Lita, after all, when she came that night after the ponies. I know that you thought…”
“I did, for a minute, and finding that I was wrong was one of the worst moments that I have ever had in my life,” I said. “But that was scarcely your fault, or Lita’s. And it’s not that I’m afraid of my child. Oh God, of course not. If I thought she could truly come to me there I would go and never leave. I guess I’m afraid…of the long nights alone. I’m afraid of being afraid. Franklin Roosevelt would not be proud of me.”
“Perhaps you should go and spend a night there and see that it does not happen,” he said soberly. I was grateful to him beyond words that he did not laugh at me, or try to tell me that I was really being silly and hysterical. I knew that I was.
“I would be glad to stay with you,” he said. “I would not even speak if you didn’t want me to. I’d just be there. Do you think that would help? Or maybe your husband…”
“No,” I said. I did not tell him that I would rather die than tell Clay I was afraid that our daughter would come to me in the night on the island and even more afraid that she would not. It would be a knife in his heart. Worse.
He nodded as though he knew.
“I think…that I’ll have to do it by myself,” I said. “And I will. Maybe in the spring, when it’s light longer and everything’s green again…I don’t know. The thing is, Luis, I think that I can’t stay there all night awake, waiting…and not drink. And somehow to drink over there is abhorrent to me. I hated it that time I did it. It feels as if it might finish me off somehow, just kill me. And…I don’t know. Poison the island somehow.”
I took a deep breath and looked up at him. I had never even admitted that to myself, and there it lay, out on the little marble-topped table between us, pulsing like a beating heart.
“It’s a first step, Caro,” he said, and covered my hand briefly with his own. It was enormous, and so callused that it felt like a leather glove that had dried in the sun. It was very warm.
“If you’re going to start that twelve-step business with me, I’m going home,” I said, annoyed that I had told him and near panic that I had actually named the beast. And not to Clay, but to Luis Cassells.
“No. It’s not time for that. It may never be,” he said. “I agree with you. The island house is no place for you to drink. And I also think you’re probably right about doing it by yourself. Let me think on it.”
“It’s not your problem, Luis,” I said, gathering up my purse and keys. “I didn’t mean to burden you with it.”
“You are no burden, Caro,” he said, and he was not smiling. “I have burdens, but you are not one of them. I have an idea, though; why don’t you come and spend a whole day there, and I’ll bring Lita and perhaps we’ll find the ponies, and maybe Ezra would come and bring Sophia and Mark, and we could just sort of…have a day at your place. Live a day in Caro’s world. You’ve had one at ours, after all. It would be wonderful fun for the children, and who knows? It might start to give you back your island.…”
“Maybe,” I said slowly, thinking of it. The sun on the greening marsh, and the quiet lap of the water against the dock, and the ponies, and the lazy banter and laughing, and maybe a picnic lunch…
The shadows that had lain thick over the house and the island in my mind lifted a bit.
“Maybe I will.”
“Name a day.”
“Well…after the holidays. Maybe a little later, when the marsh starts to green up?”
“You don’t want to let it go too long,” Luis said.
And as it turned out, I did not.
Two days before New Year’s Eve Clay came home to dinner and said, “How would you like to spend New Year’s in Old San Juan?”
I looked up from ladling the Portuguese kale soup that he loves on winter nights.
“Puerto Rico?” I said.
He read my face.
“It’s a long way from Calista. And it’s beautiful. A lot like Key West, in the oldest parts. Or vice versa, I guess. I thought you like Key West so much…”
“Oh, Clay…”
I did not know how to tell him that, for me, the very earth of Puerto Rico would always be stained now with Jeremy Fowler’s blood.
I did not have to. He sighed.
“I know. I don’t want to go, either. I swore I never would again. But Carter has a buyer, I think, and he won’t talk to anybody but me. It’s not going to do the company much good; the payments are spread out too far. But it’ll get the investors off us for a while, and it’s the only offer we’re apt to get. The main man is spending the holidays in San Juan on his yacht, doncha know, and he insists that we do this right now or not at all. I think it’s another case of jerk-the-CEO, but right now I’m not in any position to argue. I thought you just might want to come. You’re apt to be lonesome here by yourself. I mean, you’re not painting much anymore, are you? I didn’t think you’d been over to…the other house for a while.”
“No, I…well, maybe I will start again,” I said, not wanting to get into my reasons for avoiding the island. “The weather’s wonderful. And I need to give the house a good cleaning.…”
“Take Estelle for that, for God’s sake,” he said, lapsing into his pre-Christmas abstracted irritablility. “You don’t need to be humping out houses yourself.”
“I think it might be just what I do need,” I said stubbornly. There was no reason on earth to quarrel with Clay about who cleaned the island house. I could simply do it myself and not tell him, if I wanted to. The fact was that I felt the walls of the bubble beginning to erode badly, and it frightened and angered me. Had it been so much to ask, this period of giddy peace?
“Suit yourself,” Clay said coolly, and went upstairs to his office. Thus it was that when he left for Puerto Rico two days later, the kisses we gave each other were cheek kisses only, and glancing ones at that. I hated it but did not know how to get the past three weeks’ intimacy back, and he gave no sign that he wanted to.
When he was gone, I sat down in my shining, empty house and suddenly could not bear it. I dug out my battered Day-Timer and consulted it, and then dialed the number I had written down for the little nameless store in Dayclear.
Janie answered.
“Sto’.”
“Janie, it’s Caro Venable. Could you get a message to Mr. Cassells for me, do you think?”
“Reckon so. They outside playin’ football right now.”
When he came to the phone, I said, “Don’t you ever work?”
“Ah, if only I could,” he said lugubriously. “But instead I must hang around this store waiting for you to call. I’m weeks behind. Mengele will gas me. Or connect my ear to my fat Cubano butt.”
I laughed; I could not help it. The fragile sorcery of Christmas came drifting back.
“Do you think you could take your fat Cubano butt over to my house today? I’m going to be around, and we’re not apt to get a better day to show Lita the ponies. If I can find them.”
“My butt is yours,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I think the ponies are around your place somewhere. Ezra was out on the creek yesterday and saw them hanging around under your porch.”
“Lord, I hope they’re not chewing on the supports again,” I said. “They aren’t pressure treated, and I’ve found enough teeth marks on them so that one day they’re going to gnaw through them like beavers. Granddaddy said it was the salt that soaked into the wood that they like.”
“I think it’s more apt to be the six tons of windfall apples I’ve been lugging over there every week, at Lady Lita’s direction,” he said.
“You’ve built a pony trap under my porch,” I said, grinning into the telephone.
“Sí, senora,” he said in a dreadful Latino whine.
“I’ll be over directly,” I said. “I’ll bring a picnic lunch. You bring whatever you want to drink for the two of you.”
When I got out of the Cherokee there was no one in sight, and I stopped still and looked up at the weathered gray house on its stilts, dreaming in its shroud of silvery moss and the mild sun. It was a warm, sweet morning, so much like the spring that was still six weeks away, that I could almost hear the little liquid sucking sound that the wet earth sometimes makes in spring, as the dormant roots come alive again and drink in the standing rain. Out on the creek the water danced and sparkled, and the sky over it was the pale washed blue that March brings. The sun was already warm on my forearms and the top of my head, and I took off the hat that I had worn. I waited. Nothing happened, nothing broke the silence except the distant cacophony of the returning ducks and waterbirds in the big freshwater pond across the river and the tiny rustlings of small things that should, by right, still be sleeping in the mud. Well, I thought, what did you expect to hear? But I knew.
Anxiety crawled out of the pit of my stomach and closed around my heart. I shook my head and walked briskly up the steps to the house. I would not have this. Not on this most beneficent of days. Not here. Not now.
There were baskets and grocery bags piled at the door, and a small sack of the tiny, gnarled Yates apples that lay everywhere in the long grass of the island, the last spawn of centuries-old orchards. I knew they would be as sweet as smoke and honey, but that you were quite apt to meet half a worm if you bit into one. Pony bait, I was sure. So Luis and Lita were already here. But where? I saw no vehicle, and there was no sign at all of the herd.
And then there was. The familiar, half-spectral sound of their hoofbeats in soft, wet earth came bursting down the road that led into the hummock. My breath stopped. Then the herd itself swept into view, still looking like clumsily made toys. They were not galloping, as they sometimes did, but trotting phlegmatically along in a messy knot. At the rear, I saw the awkward sprite’s shape of Nissy’s colt, capering on longer legs, and then Nissy herself. Lita was on her back, sturdy little legs clamped around Nissy’s fat, shaggy stomach, hands intertwined in the scabrous mane. Beside them, Luis Cassells trotted, breathing hard but keeping up. I put my hands to my mouth, my heart pounding. I had seen this before, in another, distant lifetime. I did not know if I could handle it again.
Nissy set her splayed hooves in an abrupt, skidding stop and Lita slid off her back, crowing with joy. She ran straight to me and threw her arms around me and buried her head in my stomach.
“Ay, Caro! The jaca, she let me montar…”
“English, Lita,” Luis said, puffing and laughing. “Ingles, por favor.”
Lita threw her head back and looked up at me.
“Nissy let me ride her! It’s the first time! Abuelo…Grandfather said I could surprise you. Are you surprised, Caro?”
I reached down slowly, almost reluctantly, and touched the damp curls on top of her head. It was all right. They were springy and a bit wiry, not like Kylie’s at all. I ruffled them.
“I am surprised,” I said. “You must be a witch. I didn’t think the old lady would let anybody near her.”
Not again, my heart said.
Luis pulled sugar cubes out of the pockets of his blue jeans and offered one to the nervously pawing Nissy. She looked at him, the whites of her eyes showing so that she looked wall-eyed and stupid, and then took it delicately. The colt came skittering up and nosed at Luis’s hand, and gobbled his sugar so fast that he choked a bit, and coughed, and tossed his big goblin’s head. We all laughed. He would grow up to be an ordinary, homely little marsh tacky like the rest of his herd, but right now he was an enchanting mixture of grace and caricature.
“He really does need a name,” I said.
“He has one,” Lita said shyly. “That is, if you like it. I call him Yambi. It means ‘yam’ in the Vai language. Ezra told me. He eats all the yams we bring him. Auntie Tuesday lets Abuelo take the leftover ones and put them under your porch, and they’re always gone when he comes back. I know it’s him that eats them. Abuelo found one that had little tiny teeth bites in it.”
“Yambi it is then,” I said. “Hello, Yambi. Are you an honorary Gullah like Lita?”
The colt cocked his head at us, saw that no more sugar was forthcoming, wheeled, and fled away on his still-delicate hooves. In a moment the entire herd had one of its feigned panic attacks and went thundering back down the road toward the line of the woods.
Lita’s small face screwed up with dismay, and Luis said, “They’ll be back after a while. You wait and see. They’ll come back for lunch. There’s not a marsh tacky alive that can resist the smell of…what, Caro?”
“Ham sandwiches. Egg salad. Tuna fish on hoagy rolls. Potato salad I made myself. Estelle’s fruitcake. Chocolate chip cookies. Oh, and taco chips.”
“Taco chips,” Luis said triumphantly. “Marsh tackies never get enough taco chips. They’ll be back begging and pleading.”
We stowed the groceries and my picnic basket and Auntie Tuesday’s big plastic jug of lemonade, and went back out into the sun. As if by previous agreement, though there had been none, we drifted across the wet grass to the edge of the marsh and stood looking across it toward the creek. The grasses waved in the soft, fish-smelling breeze like the sea that lay beyond, and I saw for the first time the faintest tinge of gold-green, just at the tips, so that they looked as if they were haloed. That suffusion of new green meant the coming of the spring in the Lowcountry.
Please, no, something inside me whispered. It is not time for the spring yet. It’s much too early for the green-up. It’s merely an aberration. We have weeks of winter yet.
And we did; I knew that. This haze of green was an aberration; it happened sometimes on the marshes, when there had been a lot of rain and almost no cold. I was still safe there in the bubble of winter.
The weight of the sun on us was palpable, and the smell of salt and clean mud and the billions of things growing and dying deep in the black silt was mesmerizing. Small white clouds that looked like washing hung out, sailed across the tender blue sky. Songbirds set up their choruses in the small knots of myrtles and scrub trees on the little hummocks that dotted the sea of grass. We stepped onto the creaking wooden boardwalk over the marsh and strolled out toward the water that glittered in the noon sun like crumpled foil. No one spoke. Sun and sleepiness lay heavy on my eyelids.
We sat silently for quite a long time on the little dock, swinging our legs over the edge toward the water. The Whaler and the canoe had been put away in their cradles under the house, but I had forgotten the salt-faded old oilcloth cushions, and we laid them on the uneven old boards and stretched out on them in the sun. I closed my eyes under its red weight. I could hear the water slapping hollowly against the pilings below and smiled slightly. It was the sound of all my summers in this place.
Beside me, Luis said quietly, “How is it for you? Is it all right?”
“Yes,” I said, not opening my eyes. “So far it’s all right. It seems that so long as the sun is out, it’s okay.”
“Then we shall stop the sun,” he said in the tone of Moses commanding the Red Sea to part, and I smiled again. Pretty soon the slapping water faded, and I think that I slept for a while.
A great splashing and shrill shouts from Lita woke me. She and Luis were standing at the very edge of the dock, looking back toward the shore. I scrambled to my feet, sweating and confused, and staggered over to join them.
Dolphins. A school of them, huge and rubbery and silvery, so close that you could see their silly, cunning smiles and hear the wet, breathy little noises of their blowholes. They were churning straight for the marshy banks of the creek, silvery thrashing ahead of them. And then, incredibly, they drove a roiling school of small fish into the reeds and floundered, slapping and blowing, out of the water and onto the bank after them. Each of the six or seven huge dolphins managed to eat a fair number of the fish before they half rolled, half flapped themselves back into the water. They frisked for a moment, flashing tails and fins, and then were gone.
I began to laugh.
“My grandfather told me about them,” I said. “I never believed him. He said there was a…what? A group, a pod…of salt river dolphins that actually drive the fish on shore and go after them and eat them. He said they only exist from about Seabrook down to Hunting Island, and that they taught themselves to do that ages ago, and it’s almost a genetic thing with them by now. But only with this particular group. Any visiting schools have got to do it the old-fashioned way. They work for it.”
“Ah, Dios, how perfect,” Luis said softly. “They know so much better than we do how to use their world, and they do not need to either destroy it or leave it. They’re very smart fish, dolphins. Do you know that some of the old Gullahs call them horsemen?”
“Horsemen? Why?”
“I’m not sure I understand. It’s a tale one of the old men told around the stove at the store one night. I think it’s because the fishermen used to know a trick: they’d go out to where they knew the dolphins liked to hang out, and they’d bang on the sides of the boat underwater, slow, heavy bangs, and for some reason that attracted the dolphins, and they’d come swimming toward the boat, driving the fish before them. So there was fish for everybody then: the fishermen and the dolphins alike. I made out that they call them horsemen partly because they work for men like intelligent horses do. The ‘men’ part I think has to do with certain…ah, bodily parts that apparently are quite like…”
“I get you,” I said, feeling myself redden.
He leered.
Lita came running back from the bank, flushed with excitement.
“I touched one!” she cried. “I just reached right out and touched him on his head, and he let me! It was like touching wet rubber!”
“They’re pretty tame,” I said. “The ones around here, anyway. You know, sometimes they sleep right off this dock, just sort of drift suspended in the water and sleep all night.”
“How do you know they sleep?” Lita said. “Maybe they’re just fooling. I do that sometimes.”
“You can hear them snore,” I said. “No kidding, I’m serious. I’ve heard them snoring in the nights in summer, when the windows are open, so loud that you can’t sleep. It’s a funny, snorty, bubbling sound, but it’s definitely snoring. When eight or ten of them are doing it, you can kiss your slumbers good-bye.”
“I don’t believe you,” Luis said, obviously wanting to.
“Scout’s honor. My grandfather said they’d been doing it since he was a young boy out here. If you don’t believe me, you just come spend the night sometime and listen yourself—”
I stopped, reddening again.
“I’ll do that,” he said.
“Isn’t it lunchtime?” Lita said from the end of the dock, where she was watching in case the dolphins came back.
“Can you wait a little longer?” Luis said. “We’re having company for lunch.”
“Who, Abuelo?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Not much of one,” I said, as the menacing growl of the Harley-Davidson curled into the still air. It grew rapidly until it and the machine burst into the clearing at the same time. I saw that three people rode astride, one sandwiched between the other two.
“It’s Mark!” Lita shrieked in an excess of joy. “It’s Mark the nark and Ezra Shmezra!”
“And Sophia, of course,” Luis said dryly, giving her a long look.
“Yeah. Her, too. Okay. I know. I’ll be polite.”
I lifted my eyebrows at Luis over her head.
“Competition,” he mouthed silently, and I laughed.
“It starts young.”
“Does it ever. Of course, she is one fine-looking lady, you must admit.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I must, at that.”
“Just not my type.” He grinned. “I like ’em down and dirty.”
I bridled, and then looked down at myself. I was all black mud up to the knees of my blue jeans, and my rubber Bean shoes were caked with it. My T-shirt was spattered with marsh water. My hair hung around my face and stuck to it with noonday sweat, and I could feel twigs and bits of moss caught in it. In disgust I twisted it up off my neck and secured it with the rubber band I carry with me always, for just such a purpose.
“That’s pretty,” Luis said. “You look sort of Spanish like that.”
“Like one of Velázquez’s majas?”
“Yeah. Like that. I’ll bet you’ve been told that before.”
“Only once,” I said.
Mark and Lita rushed to meet each other, shrieking in the ear-piercing treble of small children everywhere; I had almost forgotten it. They rushed off together down to the edge of the creek, where, from her extravagant gestures, I gathered that Lita was telling him about the dolphins. Ezra and Sophia came down the little rise to the edge of the boardwalk. He wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt and looked, Luis said in my ear, like a brick shithouse. Sophia, to my surprise, wore skintight, faded blue jeans spattered with black mud and a large, flapping man’s blue work shirt with an elbow out and filthy, wet sneakers. She still managed to look like an Ibo princess, though. Just a slightly grimy one. She was carrying the smart Louis Vuitton tote that I never saw her without, and I saw the outline of the ubiquitous camera and tape recorder inside it, as well as several small, plastic-wrapped bundles and a long, pale brown baguette.
“Brothers and sisters,” boomed Ezra. “Let us break bread. Since we brought it, that is.”
“We did, too. Caro brought enough for an army,” Luis said, clapping Ezra on his massive shoulder. In the sun that poured straight down, Ezra Upchurch shone almost blue. It was a beautiful color, rich and virile and somehow royal. I thought that he would match Sophia Bridges in elegance any day, as long as he stood in sunlight.
“Caro,” Sophia said coolly. She looked levelly at me. Her face was calm and courteous, but closed.
“Sophia,” I said back.
We lapsed into silence, and the men stood quietly, too, watching us. What is the matter with everybody? I thought in irritation, but still I did not speak, and still we regarded each other, Sophia Bridges and I.
What are you doing here? her long almond eyes said to me as clearly as if she had spoken. You are not a part of this company. You belong on the other side of that bridge. You belong with Clay Venable. Where do you stand in this?
I might ask you the same thing, my eyes said back to her. So do you belong with Clay Venable. So do you belong on the other side…of the bridge and the fence. Where do you stand in this?
We were silent for another moment, and then, just as Ezra drew a breath to speak, we burst into simultaneous laughter, and the day slid smoothly into afternoon, wrapped in sunlight and the sweet false spring. Only then did I remember that it was New Year’s Eve.
We ate lunch late, and we ate for a long time. I didn’t remember being so hungry for weeks, months. We ate most of my sandwiches and a great deal of Estelle’s fruitcake and divinity, and we finished off the silky truffle pâté with cornichons and the baguette Sophia brought.
“Where did you get this gorgeous stuff?” I said, licking a smear of truffle off my fingers. You could probably get pâtés in Charleston, but I knew that the closest Peacock’s Island had to them was liverwurst.
“She ordered it from this little bistro she knows, around the corner from her house in the Village,” Ezra said, drawing out “beee-stro.” “She sent to Charleston for the baguette. You could have fooled me. All this time I thought I was eating French bread.”
Despite his disreputable clothes and shuck-and-jive demeanor, I knew that he was no stranger to truffle pâté and baguettes. Ezra had a town house in Washington, D.C., that I had heard was as spare and elegant as he himself was massive and shambling. Lottie had told me in amusement that Architectural Digest had been after him for years to let them do a spread on it, but he always told them that the hens were laying good and he didn’t want to disturb them, or other of the down-home nonsense that so charmed the national media.
“I happen to know that you have a charge account at Zabar’s,” Sophia retorted. She was lying with her back against the railing of my porch, as indolent in the slanting sun as a jungle cat. After our explosion of mutual laughter, things between us had been comfortable, if not intimate. I enjoyed the comfort, knowing that intimacy with me or many other people was probably beyond this beautiful, tight-drawn creature. I saw her smile fully and often only at Mark—and once or twice at Ezra.
“Wouldn’t that be something,” I murmured to Luis, when they had gone to the Harley to stow the plastic pitcher and the disposable champagne glasses they had had, Ezra told us, to go to the Edisto Wal-Mart for.
“A veritable mating of titans.” He grinned. “But I wouldn’t count on it. I’d just as soon woo a totem pole as Miz Sophia Bridges, and Ezra has at least six women in every port. I don’t know how he’s standing his enforced celibacy down here.”
“Maybe he isn’t,” I said.
“Yeah, I think he is. He doesn’t cross the bridge to Peacock’s that I know of, and he’s around Dayclear practically all the time.”
“What does he do?”
“Hangs out, mostly. Talks to the old folks. Visits. Listens to the tales. Tells some of them around the stove. He’s preached once or twice. You forget he’s a preacher sometimes, but you should hear him in the pray house. It’s something to make your hair stand up. And he’s with Sophia and Mark a lot. He’s showing them all sorts of stuff, and she’s writing it down in the goddamned little book of hers, or poking that recorder in his face. And Mark is just drinking it in. That kid has bloomed like kudzu. I don’t think he had any idea he was black. Now I think he wishes he was as black as Ezra.”
“That’s a switch for her,” I said. “I think all their friends in New York were white as a field of lilies. I’m surprised she allows the exposure.”
“Yeah, I am, too. There’s something going on there, but I don’t know what it is. Sometimes she gets the oddest look on her face, and sometimes she just…turns her head. Or walks away. But she’s always back the next day. If I didn’t know her for the little Mengele-ite she is, I’d think her interest was more than anthropological. But leopards like that don’t usually change their spots.”
The sun slanted lower, and was so beneficent on our faces and arms that no one moved off the deck for another hour or so. The children, worn out, napped on the living room sofas. We four talked, but it was not the sort of talk that demands or receives intense attention. It was as drifting and desultory as the talk between the oldest of friends, only we weren’t that. I put it down to the cockeyed magic of this strange, displaced spring day that had fallen into our midwinter.
Presently, into a lull, I said, “Why do you come back here, Ezra?”
He did not answer for so long that I thought perhaps I had offended him, and looked over at him. But his big face was calm, and his eyes were fastened off on the creek, where the glitter was turning from hot white to gold.
“I think…to remember who I am,” he said. “And to remember who they are. I don’t think we’re going to have all this”—and his big arm made a sweeping motion that took in everything my eyes could see and all that they couldn’t—“very much longer.”
I said nothing. Neither did Sophia Bridges. We carefully did not look at each other. I felt a bolt of complicity leap from my mind to hers, though. Shame and unease followed it. No fair. My bubble time was not up yet.
“Nothing seems to have changed in Dayclear in a hundred years,” Luis said sleepily. “It’s like Brigadoon.”
“I wish it were,” Ezra said. “The fact is, a lot has changed just since I was here last, and lots more since I left to go to college. The old ways are going. The old stories are being forgotten, and the old dances, and the old ways of making things…baskets, circle nets. None of the young folks come back often enough to learn the shouts or hear the histories and mythologies of their own families. In another generation, nobody is going to understand the language, much less speak it, and no kids are going to play ‘Shoo, turkey, shoo,’ or sing ‘Sally ’round the sunshine.’ Nobody’s scared of the hags and the plateyes anymore. We’ll even have lost our ghosts, and that’s when you know you’re a poor, sorry-assed people.”
I felt rather than saw Luis Cassells’s eyes on me. I would not look up.
“And you’re here to try to preserve the old ways? To see that they go on?” I said. I realized that I sounded like an elementary school teacher talking to her class, but I wanted to get off the ghost business quickly.
“Oh, no,” he said, and laughed richly. “I leave all those fine endeavors to Miz Bridges here. She a cultural anthropologist atter all.” He gave it the rural black pronunciation. Sophia’s mouth tightened.
“No, I’m just here to…bear witness, I guess. Oh, I do what I can. When I preach I talk about the real world, of course, because they live in it, after all, but I always end with one of the old songs, and I use the rhythms of the old shouts. For one thing, I love them. They come right up out of my gut. For another, no preacher is going to survive in these little communities who doesn’t tap into those deepest feelings.
“It’s not that all the old ways are gone,” he went on. “I could take you all right now and walk you not three miles from here and show you a graveyard that’s completely surrounded with woods, just buried in them. Some of the graves are new, too. They’re hidden in the woods so the poor spirits of the dead can’t get out and get lost and roam away. And you’d be apt to find an alarm clock on lots of those graves, an old rusty drugstore windup job, with its hands stopped at the moment of the deceased’s death. And pictures, photos, in fancy frames. Family shots, mainly, but always what the dead loved most. I know of one fine picture of a mule in that graveyard.
“All the old Dayclear names are there. Some of mine are. My mama and grandmama are there. So is my uncle, Auntie Tuesday’s husband. Peters. Miller. Cato. Bullock.” He paused a moment and looked intently at Sophia, who was digging for the tape recorder, to catch the scholarly words.
“Mackey,” he said.
She put the recorder down and turned her head away. But before she did, I thought I caught the glisten of tears in her dark eyes, and then wondered if I had, after all. It did not seem possible.
The silence that followed was no longer comfortable. He seemed to realize that he had broken a spell.
“And I painted my front door blue, in D.C.,” he said in a bantering tone. “Everybody admires it as a creative touch. They don’t believe me when I tell ’em it wards off evil spirits. But I haven’t had a plateye since I moved in.”
We laughed, but we could not get the sleek skin of the moment back. I looked around restlessly. The heat was going out of the afternoon, and the sun was nearly level with the tops of the trees far across the marsh, on the verge of the inland waterway. The sky was turning gold. The old anxiety came stealing back, rising in my throat, marching up my vertebrae one by one, like stair steps.
“I need to get back,” I said. “This has been…wonderful. I can’t tell you. But I’ve got…stuff I need to do.”
“Me, too,” Sophia said briskly. “Mark and I have been invited to a little New Year’s Eve party with some of his kindergarten friends’ parents. Let me go get those children on the road.”
“Can I persuade either of you to stay and listen to me preach at the New Year’s Eve watch service tonight?” Ezra said. “I can promise you more shouting and singing than you ever heard. I am amazing when I get going. You could get a whole chapter out of this thing, Sophie Lou.”
“I really can’t. Thanks, though,” she said crisply. She got up and went into the living room to wake the children. In the darkening gold of sunset, she looked suddenly very small and thin. What was it he had said, to drive her away from us like this?
He looked after her, and then at Luis.
“Losin’ my fabled touch,” he said, and grinned, but there was no warmth in it.
He settled Sophia and Mark on the Harley and eased off down the driveway, slowly now, to take them back to Dayclear, where Sophia’s car was. Luis and I sat on the steps, watching the night come in from the west. It was not coming fast, but it made me want to leap to my feet, to run for my car, to be away and gone. Lita slept on in Luis’s arms. He looked down at her, and then at me.
“I left the truck a half-mile or so down the road where we saw the ponies,” he said. “If you need to go, maybe you could drop us off there. I think I’ve lost the princess for the night.”
“I will in a minute,” I said. I sat, listening to the night wind that was ruffling the water far out, to the sleepy twitters of the birds as they settled down off in the hummocks. To the soughing of the great oaks over our heads. To the tiny scratchings and rustlings that meant the small night creatures were waking up, to hunt or be hunted. There was nothing untoward, nothing I had not heard a thousand times before out here. And still I listened.…
“Let her go, Caro,” Luis said softly. “Just…let her go.”
I turned my face to him, feeling the color drain out of it.
“You mean…just forget her? Just…throw her out?”
He shook his head.
“Of course not. You won’t forget her. How could you? I mean…stop calling her back with your need and your hunger and your pain. It’s too big a burden for one little ghost to carry. Send her off with your love and pride and all the things you laughed at and all the tears you cried together. You won’t lose her. It’s like the old saying, ‘Hold a bird lightly in the palm of your hand and it will always come back to you.’ And maybe then there’ll be some room inside you for…other things. Other people.”
I started to protest that there were other people in my heart, many of them, but then did not. There was a great grief rising in me, like a storm.
“How will I live without her?” I whispered.
“I’ll tell you. It’s a game I know. It works for me. Just close your eyes and think of what you’d be willing to die for, and then—live for it. It’s very simple, really.”
I just looked at him.
“The only rule of this game is that whatever you choose has to be alive,” he said very gently.
I dropped my eyes. The heaviness of tears was near to overflowing.
“Go on,” he said. “Try it. Close your eyes. Say to yourself, ‘What would I die for?’ and grab the very first thing that comes into your mind. No thinking about it. The very first thing.”
I closed my eyes. Behind them, red and white lights arced and pinwheeled.
“What would I die for?” I said soundlessly to myself, and saw, not Clay’s face, not even that of my lost child, or Carter’s…but today. The day just past. The island, the dock, the low sun on the water, the dolphins, the ponies pounding down the sandy road, a small child who was not my child clinging in joy to one of the stumpy necks. My house on its stilts, its head in the moss and live oak branches. The island. My island.
I looked back at him.
“Yes,” he said, and now he was smiling.
“Well, let’s get you going,” he said, struggling to his feet with the sweet, limp weight of the sleeping child in his arms.
“No. I’m going to stay,” I said.
He studied me gravely.
“Are you sure? There’s lots of time for that. Today was…a very full day for you.”
“I’m sure. You said it yourself, not long ago. There’s no more time. Now is it, for me.”
He stood quietly in the dusk for a moment, and then he shifted the child to one shoulder. She mumbled sleepily, but did not really wake. I leaned over and kissed her swiftly on the top of her head.
Luis Cassells put out his hand and touched my hair, very lightly.
“Don’t drink, Caro,” he said.
He turned and went down the steps with his granddaughter, and in a moment was lost to my sight in the darkness under the trees.
Presently, I heard the distant motor of the Peacock Island Company pickup catch, and then it faded, and the great quiet came down again.
And I did not drink. I sat sleepless before my fire all through the night, and I saw the dawn of New Year’s Day born red behind the live oaks, but I did not drink.