But I did not do that, after all, because when I finally had had enough coffee to jump-start my courage and called him at his office, it was to learn, from a Shawna whose smirk was almost visible over the wire, that he was gone again.
“Just ran out the door,” she said happily. “Got a call about an hour ago from Atlanta and he and Hayes were out of here like scalded tomcats. He said for me to tell you when you called, and that he’d be away three or four days. The bigwigs are flying them to Texas to see some kind of Wild West theme park thing out there. Reckon we’re all going to be wearing ten-gallon hats. Oh, and he said to tell you he was just fine, felt great, and to call Charlie and tell him. That’s his doctor, isn’t it? I could do that for you. I wouldn’t mind talking to that doctor myself. I heard about Puerto Rico. Somebody needs to tell him just what’s going on, and I know Clay isn’t going to do it.…”
“Thank you so much, Shawna,” I said through clenched teeth. It dawned on me that my head was pounding badly and my nose was stuffed up. Sinus infections are spring’s first gift to me, and if I was in for one, the last thing I needed was to listen to Shawna chirp her love and ownership of my husband to me at ten o’clock in the morning.
“I’ll call Charlie myself,” I said. “We went over last week and saw him; he knows all he needs to know about Clay’s condition. He’s been our doctor for a long time. He was in our wedding. He would want to talk to Clay or me.”
I heard her affronted little snort and realized that I had been cruel, and did not care. Shawna set herself up for rebuffs like a tenpin, over and over again. I wondered if she thought that if I were out of the picture Clay would sweep her into his arms? Look at her one afternoon, walk slowly to her, pull the pins out of her hair, and remove her glasses and whisper, “My God. I never realized.”
Fat chance.
The sinus infection settled in by noon. I knew that I had done it to myself, sitting in the damp wind on the wet beach last night, and did not care at all. The infections make me sick and so dizzy that it is hard to walk, and the pressure in my eyes and cheeks feels like intense sleepiness. My face swells and my eyes close, and I am good for nothing but to burrow into bed and sleep. I know that they last approximately three full days and nights; if I take antibiotics, perhaps two and a half. When the fourth day dawns I am invariably as clear-headed and full of energy as I ever was, and so I have learned to give in to them, cancel whatever I can, and crawl into bed with hot tea and magazines.
And that is what I did. Estelle knows the drill now; she does not hover, but she keeps a carafe of hot tea beside my bed, and leaves soup and sandwiches for me, and goes on about her business. If Clay is at home he checks on me occasionally, but I really do prefer to be left alone, and it pleases me when one of the attacks happens to fall during one of his business trips. I don’t feel so much that I am wasting time.
I will wonder the rest of my life what would have happened if I had not been at home in bed for the next three days. Or what would not have.
On the morning of the fourth day I awoke and the room did not spin and my eyes did not feel poached and my face was not swollen to the size of a cantaloupe, and I was ravenous. I showered and washed my hair and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt—for outside it was still warm and sweet with sun—and went downstairs. Estelle, smiling, made me sausage and cheese grits, and gave me a list of the calls that had come in while I was out of pocket. None were from Clay. One was from Shawna: Clay and Hayes were going on west with the SouthWard people, to see a gold rush theme park in northern California. Perhaps they would be in by Thursday. He would let Shawna know where he could be reached. They were on the move almost constantly; I probably couldn’t reach him.
“I have my finger on him for you though, Caro,” Shawna chirped. I made a rude noise at the answering machine and finished my coffee and thought about the soft golden week spinning out ahead of me. The light on the marshes would be wonderful: ineffable and radiant. I jumped up and rooted out my paints and camera and threw some clothes into my duffel and fairly flew to the island.
I was set up on the end of the dock, drowning in the gilt glitter off the water and the marshes, breathing in the clean old salt breath of the island, feeling the sun pouring like pale new clover honey over my arms and face, when I heard the shouts from the house. I knew without turning around that it was Luis Cassells, and that something was badly wrong.
By the time I had pounded halfway down the dock, he came around the corner of the house, stumbling and running, and in his arms he carried Lita. Her face was buried in his neck and she did not move. My heart swooped into my stomach and back up, and I stumbled and nearly fell. “Dear Lord, goddamn it, you take care of this little girl,” I whispered as I ran.
I met him at the steps up to the dock. He thrust her into my arms and I took her automatically and held her close. She scrubbed her face into my shoulder. I watched him as he stood there, head hanging, chest heaving for breath enough to speak. While I stood I was going over the sick-child checklist in my mind, as I had done a thousand times; I did it automatically. Breathing shallow but clear, skin cool, grip strong. She was obviously conscious and I had seen no blood. Her arms were so tight around me that I could hardly get my own breath. I waited.
He lifted his head and looked at me, and his face was white under the tan and mottled red over his cheeks. His eyes were opaque black and blazing with something: fear and anguish, I thought, and fury.
“Take her to Auntie, over in Dayclear,” he rasped. “Tell her to keep her warm. Then get Janie to ring the bell; Ezra and Esau are fishing down at the bridge. When they come, tell Ezra to bring a truck and meet me here, and to bring whoever else is around who can lift. And then go back and stay with Lita…”
“What is it, Luis?”
“It’s the horses,” he said sickly. “The mare and the colt. We found them about a half-mile down the creek. We were bringing apples for them. They’ve been poisoned, and I think it was the apples; there are half-digested apples all over the place. Tell Ezra that, too. I’m going to wait here for them. I’ll need something to carry some of the apples in, and a tarp or something to cover the pile under the house. Don’t go near those apples, and don’t let anybody from Dayclear but Ezra and the men come back here. Especially no children.”
“I’ll call a vet, and the rangers,” I said. Lord God, please. Not Nissy and the baby. I was afraid to ask.
“Not the rangers! I mean that, Caro. Just get Ezra and tell him what I said. We’ll take the colt to the vet in the truck, it’s faster.”
“Nissy…” I whispered in dread.
“We can’t help her, Caro. But the colt is still alive, I think. It would be good if somebody could walk the creek and see if any of the other horses are…sick. There’s no way to know how many of the apples were eaten.…”
“Who could do such a thing?” I said through stiff white lips; I had felt them blanch.
“Who, indeed?” he spat. “But I’ll tell you who thinks she did. Lita does. She thinks she did it with her apples. She hasn’t said one word since. I’m so afraid for her. My God…go on now. Get her out of here. Auntie has some kind of tea that she uses for sleep; tell her to give Lita some of that.…”
“Luis…”
“GO, CARO!”
I helped him ease the limp child into the Cherokee and ran up for my keys and ran back down. Clashing the Jeep into gear, I said to him, “Did she see?”
“She found them,” he said, and closed his eyes. Then he gave the car fender a smack and said, “Vamanos,” and turned and went under my house to find the tarp that stayed there, over the whaler. I screeched out of the yard and headed as fast as I dared for Dayclear and Ezra’s Auntie Tuesday. Lita lay with her head in my lap, eyes closed, perfectly still. Her face was as white and empty as that of a dead child. There were no tear tracks on her bleached cheeks.
When I reached the store I held the horn down with the flat of my hand. Janie came out, muttering darkly, saw me and the child in my lap, and put both hands to her mouth.
“Ring the bell,” I called, and she turned and ran. In a second I heard it speak with its great dark voice, like eternity. The sound seemed to roll on forever.
“Send Ezra and Esau down to Auntie’s,” I said. “Luis needs them over at my place. Oh, God, I never thought…Is Auntie at home, do you know?”
“She to home,” Janie said. “I seen her this morning, and she say comp’ny comin’ and she got to brew some tea. I give her some lemons an’ sugar for it.…What the matter with the baby, Caro?”
“Somebody poisoned the horses,” I quavered. I was finding it hard to speak past the dread that lay cold and knotted in my throat. Under it was a red anger of a magnitude I had never known. But I knew that I could not let it out yet.
“This baby didn’t get none of it, did she?” Janie cried.
“No. But she found the horses. The mother is dead. Luis needs Ezra and Esau to bring a truck; he wants to take the colt to the vet in it. And he needs some people to walk the creek and see if any other horses got into the apples.”
“I tell ’em when they come. An’ I go walk that creek myself,” she said. “You get that baby on down to Auntie. I reckon she know what to do; she knowed you was coming, didn’t she? Go on now…”
“Thank you, Janie,” I said, and screeched off down the lane. Far off down the hidden creek I thought I heard the faint, stuttering drone of a faulty outboard engine.
Auntie Tuesday stood in her doorway. She looked from me to the child with her milky old eyes and shook her head.
“MMMMM, MMMMM,” she said sadly. “Badness walkin’ right up here in the world today, sho is. Bring that baby on in here. I ’spec we can find somethin’ make her feel better.”
I lifted Lita and brought her up the steps. She still did not remove her face from my shoulder, and she still did not speak. Occasionally she shuddered, a deep, racking tremor that ran all through her, but that was all. I started to put her down on the little cot in the corner, where Auntie slept, but she shook her head at me.
“Set down in that rockin’ chair and rock her,” she said. “I done built up the fire. You jus’ get settled comfortable and rock her now. Keep on a’rockin’ her. I got somethin’ on the stove do her some good.…”
“She’s not sick or hurt,” I said over Lita’s head. “She saw something terrible and she thinks it’s her fault. She’s stopped talking again. But it’s not physical.…”
“I knowed it wasn’t her body,” Auntie said. “Look like it worse when it git the soul. Well, we do what we can. We do what we can. The Lord give us things from the earth help the soul as well as the body, and He tell those of us what’ll listen how to use ’em. It the tackies, ain’t it?”
“How did you know?” I could only whisper it.
“Seen ’em last night. Seen ’em in the fire. Knew somethin’ dark was after them. If it’s a happy thing coming I sees it in water. Here, see will she take this.”
She brought a chipped cup of something steaming hot from the old stove in the corner of the dark little room. I took it, not questioning for an instant the wisdom of giving a child the arcane brew of whatever this strange old woman found in the woods. I held the cup to Lita’s lips.
“Take a sip for me, baby,” I said.
But she turned her head away.
“Give her to me,” Auntie said. “I been gittin’ that tea down chirrun’s craws for lots of years now.”
She indicated that I should get up and let her sit down in the rocker and put the child in her lap.
“Auntie, she’s too heavy for you,” I said. “I’m afraid she’ll break one of your little old bones.”
“Ain’t no child gon’ hurt me,” she said, and I got up with Lita, and she settled herself stiffly into the rocker and held out her arms, and I put the child into them. Lita’s face found the thin old shoulder and burrowed there. Her legs dangled almost to the floor, but Auntie held her firmly. She put her face down to the top of Lita’s head and whispered something into her hair, and began to rock. Presently I heard her begin to sing softly, in a thin reedy old monotone:
“Fix me, Jesus, fix me right,
Fix me so I can stand.
Fix my feet on a solid rock
Fix me so I can stand.
My tongue tired and I can’t speak plain,
Fix me so I can stand,
Fix my feet on a solid rock,
Fix me so I can stand…”
She sang it over and over, more a faraway, atonal chant than a song, and presently the dim little room seemed to shimmer with it, and the flickering light from the lit stove rose up to meet it, and song and fire and woman and child seemed to sway in the room until my eyes grew heavy and I nodded. Whenever I forced them open I saw that she still sat, cradling the child, rocking, rocking. The last time I looked I saw Lita lift her head from Auntie’s shoulder and sigh deeply, and relax against her into sleep.
“Thank you,” I whispered, sliding into sleep myself, but I could not have said who it was I thanked.
When I woke it was after noon; I could tell from the square of pale sunlight that was creeping across the cabin’s linoleum floor, from the open doorway. The sweet smell of high sun on pine and salt from the estuary blew into the room. Another smell, rich and green and savory, came from a big black iron kettle on the stove. Janie Biggins was stirring it and smiling over at me. Her gold tooth flashed in the sunlight from the doorway.
“That smells good,” I said. “What are you doing here, Janie?”
And then I remembered, and whipped my head around toward the rocker. It was empty. I made an inadvertent sound of fear.
“She all right,” Janie said. “She gon’ be fine. She sleepin’ hard. Auntie and I put her to bed in the spare room. She sleep a long time, I ’spec. Need to. Auntie say when she wake up maybe she talk some.”
“Oh, God, I hope so. She…There was a long time when she didn’t talk at all, before she came here. Luis didn’t know if she ever would again. I was so afraid that she’d lost it again.…”
“Auntie sing her a healin’ song. It a good one. I’ve seed it bring the tongue back to folks what had been struck and ain’t talk for months. ’Sides, Auntie seen her talkin’ in the well water. She gon’ be all right. Her mama gon’ take care of her.”
“Her mama’s dead, Janie. She’s only got her grandfather.…”
“Auntie seed her mama in the water, too,” she said, and I could tell that for her, that ended the matter. I did not pursue it.
I got up and straightened my rumpled clothes and went into the tiny, shedlike room off the cabin’s main one. A big, beautiful old rice bed stood against the far wall, the room’s only furniture, looking like a great mahogany yacht in a tiny harbor. I wondered where Auntie might have come by it; it would have been at home on Legare Street. It gleamed with care and polish. Lita lay curled in the middle of it, covered with an exquisite ivory quilt so old that it was yellowed and brittle. Her fist was doubled under her chin, and her face was smooth and calm and flushed with sleep. I listened; her breath came slow and deep and even. For now, she seemed all right. For now…
“Where’s Auntie?” I said.
“She down to the cemetery. She grow some things down there that help this child. Plant ’em there so the ancestors bless ’em. We gon’ put ’em in this here soup when she git back, and they perk her up right good. You, too. You looks like the hind axle of hard times.”
“I feel like it. It was so awful about the ponies. Has anybody heard from Luis and Ezra yet? I hate to think of that poor old mare just lying there in the sun.…”
My eyes filled up and I fell silent. It seemed too cruel for the mind to encompass.
“She ain’t lie there,” Janie said. “Esau and two, three of the others took Esau’s tractor and some log chains and move her to the woods over behind the creek, back of our cemetery. There a big hole there, go way down in the ground. Been there a long time; don’t nobody know who dug it. Our good old animals goes there. It deep and cool and real quiet. Esau drops pine branches over them.”
I put my face into my hands.
Sleep well, dear old Nissy, I said in my mind. Down there in the deep, cool, quiet ground with all the other good animals, under your green blanket.
“Here, you take some of this now,” Janie said, handing me a bowl of the soup. I took it and sipped; it was wonderful, silky and thin and tasting of green things and sea salt.
“What is it? You could make a fortune in any restaurant in Charleston with this,” I said.
“Fiddlehead soup. Found the first fiddleheads yestiddy, out in the woods. They real early this year. Auntie say they has power, but I just thinks they taste good.”
They did. Gradually the cold, hard knot of grief and the red lick of submerged anger deep inside me loosened and cooled. I went and stood on the doorstep of the cabin, looking off across the bare garden plots to the edge of the marsh and the creek. The sky was a tender, washed blue and in it specks wheeled and dove. Ospreys. I wondered if they were nesting already in the dead cypresses along the distant river. If so, we could kiss this terrible winter good-bye. The ospreys never miscalculated.
Behind me I heard a thin little voice: “Caro? Caro…”
I turned and ran for the bedroom. Janie stood in the doorway, smiling.
“Somebody wake an’ talkin’,” she said.
I sat down on the bed and smiled at Lita. She was half sitting, tangled in the quilt and frowning with sleep and confusion. Her wiry curls spilled over her forehead and cheeks, and she had the imprint of a quilted square on one of them. Her skin was lightly pearled with perspiration. She reached her arms up for me even before her eyes were fully opened, and I gathered her against me.
“You had a nice long nap, didn’t you?” I said into her hair. It did not feel at all like Kylie’s, or I don’t think I could have done it.
“Are you hungry?”
“I don’t know. Where’s Abuelo? Caro, I had the most awful dream.…”
I sat her up and brushed the hair off her face and looked into it.
“I’m afraid it wasn’t a dream, sweetie pie,” I said. “You found the horses, and they were real sick, and it made you very sad. Your grandfather and Ezra have gone to take Yambi to the doctor so he can be well again. They’ll be back before long, and they can tell you about it.”
Please let it be so, I said to the distant God who took children and horses.
“They didn’t take Nissy with them, did they?” she said in a tiny voice. I saw that she was screwing her face up with the effort not to cry.
“No, baby. They didn’t. Nissy was too sick, and she died. We didn’t see any of the other horses sick, though, so maybe they didn’t eat the apples.…”
Her breath drew in, and I winced.
“You need to know that it was not your apples that made them sick, Lita,” I said. “Somebody came and put something bad in the apples after you left them there. We know you would never hurt the horses. They know that, too. It was some bad people, and we’ll find out who it was, don’t you worry about that.”
She was silent for a while, breathing deeply. Then she looked up at me. Her eyes were entirely ringed with white, remembering.
“Her teeth were sticking out all yellow,” she said. “And there was flies in her eyes. I knew she was dead then. There was flies in my mama’s eyes, too.”
I pulled her back hard against me, my own eyes shut tight against the pain. I would have given anything on earth if I could have scrubbed the memories out of her head.
“You’re a brave girl,” I said. “It was a bad thing to see, but she isn’t suffering now. Esau took her and put her with all the other good animals from Dayclear who have…died. They’re all together.”
She sighed deeply and relaxed against me a little.
“Yambi stayed with her,” she murmured against my shoulder. “That was the right thing to do, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t leave his mama.”
“That was just the right thing to do,” I said, seeing in my mind the image of a small child huddled in a wrecked mountain hut, her shivering flesh pressed to the cold flesh of her mother. I did not think I was going to be able to bear this.
Suddenly she gave a great sob, and then pressed her fists against her mouth. Her whole body shook with the effort not to cry.
“It’s all right,” I said, beginning to rock her. “It’s good to cry. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a way of honoring Nissy. She would be pleased with your tears.”
And then they came, a great, wild storm of them, so hard and primitive and somehow ancient that I was, for a little while, frightened for her. She wept and howled, and sometimes lapsed into a phrase or two of anguished Spanish, and then howled again. I could almost hear this sound rolling out over a jungle somewhere, as old as time itself and as implacable. These were not a child’s tears.
Presently she began to subside into simple sobs and, after a long while, sniffles. When she finally pulled herself away from me and looked up, her eyes were swollen nearly shut, and her face was congested with red anguish. But her breathing was slow again, and deep.
“I think I’m hungry,” she said.
Auntie was back by now, and she brought in a bowl of the soup, presumably bearing its cargo of herbs, and a piece of hot cornbread. She sat down on the bed beside Lita and began to feed the soup to her by the spoonful, crooning wordlessly. I stood and stretched and looked down. The front of my shirt was soaking wet with Lita’s tears.
“You go in that drawer in the front room an’ git one of them ol’ undershirts,” she said. “Th’ow that shirt of your’n in the wash pot. Don’t do to sit around in it. That’s poison there.”
I looked at her.
“It’s what come out of her,” she said, smiling. “The song and the tea drawed it. Look like it got most of it, too, but you don’t want it soakin’ into you. I bile it with lye soap when I does my wash and Ezra bring it to you.”
“Oh, Auntie, I don’t care about the shirt,” I said. “I’m just so glad she’s better, and so grateful to you.…What was in that tea? What was in the soup?”
“This ‘n’ that. Little feverfew, some goldenseal, some seamuckle, jimsey, little life everlasting. You couldn’t make it, chile. It’s all in the words you says over it. I make some up before you go and you can give it to her if she git bad again, though.”
“I don’t think she’ll be with me,” I said. “I think she’ll be staying with her grandfather, unless he’s really late getting back. I’ll be glad to stay with her until he comes, though.”
“I give you some anyway,” she said.
Lita fell asleep again, and we three women sat in chairs that Janie dragged out into the dooryard, talking idly of nothing much, taking the sun. It was slanting low when the noise of an old truck came down the road, followed by the angry burr of Ezra’s Harley.
I met them up at the store. Luis’s face was drawn and grim.
“Lita?” he said.
“Sleeping. She’s been awake, and talked, and cried most of it out, I think. And she ate a good lunch. I doubt that she’ll forget it, Luis, but I think she’ll heal from it. Auntie…Auntie has been beyond wonderful.”
“I don’t think you’ve been so bad yourself, Caro,” he said, relief making the tight muscles around his mouth sag into a tired smile. “You know, it was you she cried out for before she stopped talking.”
“Oh, Luis…” I said softly.
I can’t take the weight of this, I thought.
“It’s okay,” he said, understanding. “It’s more than enough that you were here today.”
I found some beer in the cooler and opened it for him and Ezra and Esau, who had come wearily into the store behind him. They all took deep swallows, but no one spoke.
Finally I said, “The colt?”
“The colt is alive,” Ezra said, and his voice was hard and remote. I had not heard this voice before. His eyes were distant, too. I could not imagine what they saw.
“The vet thinks he’ll make it. He didn’t eat many of the apples, apparently.”
“He likes sweet potatoes better,” I said, and felt the tears sting again.
“Well, that saved him then, because those apples were full of it, whatever it is,” Ezra said. “The vet isn’t sure, but he’s got a friend with his own lab who’s running tox tests right now. He thinks probably botulism toxin. Nothing else is really powerful enough to down a grown horse so fast. He thinks that they ate the apples last night early. It would have been put in by injection. He found the holes in some of the apples.”
“My God, you don’t think it was a doctor!” I cried. Somehow the thought was horrifying beyond words.
“No, no. You can get the stuff; plastic surgeons use it, and other kinds of doctors, too. It’s around. There’s probably a real good black market for it, if you know where to go. And you can get hypodermics at any drugstore. I don’t think whoever did it got the stuff himself, but I think somebody he knew did. We’ll know more when the test comes in late tonight. If it’s botulism toxin, I think I know where to start looking for the source.”
“Where?”
“Better you just don’t ask,” he said. “I’ve got some friends in not very high places.”
We were quiet again for a bit.
“Do you think any of the rest of the herd got into the apples?” I asked.
“Doesn’t look like it right now,” Luis said. “Simon Miller and his boys from Greenville rode and walked every inch of the creek and the bottoms where they usually are. They didn’t see anything. And there were an awful lot of apples left. It looked to me like the pile we took day before yesterday was mostly still there. They’re in a croker sack in the back of the truck. I’m going to drop them in the incinerator at the dump on Edisto when I go tonight.”
“When you go?”
“Walk me down to Auntie’s,” he said. “I need to see Lita. We’ll talk on the way.”
We walked side by side down the rutted sandy road. The swift darkness was rolling in from the Inland Waterway, and the shadows of the Spanish moss laid long fingers across the road. The air was cooling rapidly. Luis walked with his hands in his pockets, his stride heavy and slow. I cradled my elbows in my hands against the chill. The old white Fruit of the Loom men’s undershirt was decent and clean, but it was worn thin.
“I’m taking her over to Edisto,” he said finally, not looking at me. “Ezra has a friend over there who’s not using his trailer. He left the key with Ezra. I can’t stay here with her, Caro. Everywhere she looked she’d remember…And who knows what’s going to come next? I can’t take the chance. I’m quitting your husband’s company, too, as soon as I can give notice in the morning. I’m not going to make myself a sitting target; she’s the one who’s vulnerable.”
I stopped dead in my tracks, looking at him.
“Dear God, surely you don’t think that Clay…”
“Of course not. But I think that somebody acting in his name, if not with his knowledge or permission, stuck those needles in those apples. We’ll probably never find out who, but I don’t really care. I can’t afford to take chances with her. You can see that, can’t you?”
“But…we…you were winning! I’ve already told you I’m not going to turn over this land; there’s no more fight to fight.…”
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Winning what? The right to eat apples with botulism toxin in them? If that’s a victory, I can’t afford it, Caro.”
I could not argue with that. Desolation settled over me. The night turned vast and cold. There were stars, the same ones I had seen over Kylie’s ocean four nights before, but I could not see their light now. It did not seem to reach the earth.
“I’ll miss both of you,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could. My voice shook.
He took a great breath as if to speak in return, but then did not. Presently he said, “You could come by and see us sometime on your way to Charleston. It’s not far off the highway. Lita would love that. I’ll be around; I’m not going to look for anything for a while, till I know she’s going to be all right. Maybe when we know about the colt. After that I’ll find something and get her into preschool. Ezra knows a woman with a good little one near the trailer park.”
“Well, of course,” I said, thinking of it: this great, exuberant force of a man, with his wild darkness and his big shoulders, pent up in a double-wide in a trailer park. The living flame that was Lita battering at those enclosing walls…
I knew that I would not visit him on Edisto.
“So when will you go?”
“In the morning, I think. Or later tomorrow. If the colt comes along like the vet thinks he will, I’d like to take her by to see for herself. I think Esau and Janie will take him when he’s well enough to leave; he’ll be used to people then, and the vet doesn’t think the herd will take him in after he’s been away so long. They’ll smell us on him. The Bigginses have a pen behind the store. I can bring Lita over in the summer and she can learn to ride him. You could come, too.…”
The plans sounded positive, full of hope, but his voice was merely defeated.
“Luis…” I began, unsure what I would say but willing almost to say anything that would bring life back into that voice.
“Don’t, Caro,” he said, his head down so that I could not see his face. “You can’t straddle two camps, and it’s not possible for you to choose one. You’ve lost too much already. I would not permit it if you could.”
I was silent. What were we speaking of, or rather, not speaking of, here?
“Abuelo! Grandpapa!” a small voice shrieked, a voice with relief and joy behind it, and we looked up to see Lita tearing out of the cabin door toward us, her arms outstretched, her face wreathed in smiles. He opened his arms and took two great strides forward, and she ran into them and was enclosed.
After that I painted. I painted for almost two straight days and nights, faster and more intensely than I have ever painted before, virtually scouring color onto the paper and then, when it tore, abandoning my watercolors and pulling out my old oils and the moldy canvases I found stacked in the utility closet and slashing at them with palette knife and stiff drypoint brushes. I put on my grandfather’s old tapes of Beethoven and Mahler, great, crashing, apocalyptic music, and I built up the fire, and when I got so tired and hungry that I dropped the knife, I opened cans of Vienna sausage and tuna fish and ate them with soda crackers and rat cheese and washed them down with Diet Cokes and fell asleep on the sofa before the fire, and dreamed more paintings.
It was almost like automatic writing, I thought, watching as if from a distance the work unrolling from my fingers onto the canvases. It was not that I was unaware of what I did; indeed, I felt an almost preternatural control, an awesome kind of focus, that I have never felt before. It was simply that I did not quite know where my subject matter was coming from. I did not go out into the marshes and sketch or photograph and return to work, as was my habit. I did not leave the living room of the house. What I painted was the island: the marshes and the river and the creeks and the hammocks, and the secret groves of live oaks and the shrouding moss, but it was not an island I knew. It seemed to be an island out of another time, seen through other eyes. I painted stormy skies and nets flying like clouds, and dark people in fierce colors with their heads thrown back and their arms outstretched, shouts and songs stretching the cords of their shining throats. I painted fires in black woods and not quite human creatures out of an African night a millennium before. I painted baptisms in blood-dark rivers and burials in firelit woods. I painted wild horses, running, running. Running free.
When I finished painting, as suddenly as I had begun, morning was well along on the third day after Luis and Lita found the horses, and I was as cool and dry and depleted as if I had given birth. And perhaps I had.
I took a shower and cooked myself a real breakfast and took the paintings out onto the deck and propped them in the white sunlight and studied them. They were crude and hastily done and primitive past anything I had never even seen in my mind, and they had a power that almost frightened me. I could not even imagine where they had come from. Well, that was not entirely true; I knew or could sense that they sprang from the bottomless well of red anger I had discovered at the poisoning of the horses, and the fear I had felt for Lita and the colt and the island…and for Clay. But the images themselves…it was as if they had passed through me from somewhere else, not had their genesis in my mind. I poked around inside myself, prodding carefully, to see if that all-generating rage still lived there. I felt none at all. Just the emptiness.
As if they had been waiting until I finished my work, Ezra and Lottie Funderburke drove up in Lottie’s little Subaru truck. I greeted them calmly, almost peacefully. I had not known that they knew each other, but it did not surprise me. Two such forces of nature on a small island: of course they would meet. Incuriously, I looked at each to see if the nature of the relationship was apparent, but it was not. They could be lovers or mortal enemies during a truce. The only thing I thought that they could not be was casual acquaintances.
“Coffee, for God’s sake,” Lottie said, stumping up onto the deck, and then, “Jesus, God, Caro! Are these yours?”
“I think so. Nobody else here but us chickens,” I said. “You want coffee, too, Ezra?”
“Please. Whhhoooee, look at that stuff! You been hag-rode in the night, Caro?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, and padded inside, barefoot, to put on the coffee.
When I came back out with the coffee tray and some stale doughnuts, Lottie was sitting on the deck floor with her back against the railing studying the paintings. Ezra stood looking out at the morning dance of the light on the creek.
“Whatever got ahold of you, you treat it good, you hear?” Lottie said. “This stuff is dynamite. I don’t know if you’ll do much with them around Charleston or in the village center. Likely scare the bejesus out of the culturines and the retired admirals. I know some odd little galleries around that would love to hang them, though. I’ll put some up in the studio, too. The kind of people who’ll buy them stop by my place pretty often. You think you’ve got any more of that in you, or did you paint it all out?”
“I just can’t tell yet,” I said. “It’s like somebody else that I don’t know did it. I’m not going to show it or sell it, though. Not now. Maybe when I can tell whether or not it’s a real direction, or just a twitch…”
“More an explosion, I’d say,” Ezra said, grinning. “You get any madder than that and you gon’ blow a hole in that canvas.”
“I don’t feel mad now,” I said. “I know I was the other day, but I can’t seem to find it again.”
“I don’t wonder,” he said. “It’s all in there.”
He gestured at the paintings.
“So, what about the colt?” I said. “What about Lita…and Luis? Have you gotten the toxicology reports yet?”
“The colt is up and running around and eating,” he said. “I’m going to take him over to Janie and Esau’s in the morning. He’s already let the vet slip a snaffle on him. Lita is talking a blue streak and pestering Luis to bring her back over here. He doesn’t feel like he can do that right now. He’s got her in preschool half a day. The other half he stays with her. He’s looking for somebody over there to stay with her after school; he’s got to get some work pretty soon. Meanwhile, mornings, he’s doing some legwork for me around the Lowcountry. The vet was right; it was botulism toxin. I know a guy who knows a guy knows a guy who might be able to find out where it was bought. We do that, we know who bought it. Luis is visiting old…contacts of mine. Be a good thing to know, that.”
“Is it…Could he be in any kind of danger?”
“Not much, I don’t think. Not till he gets closer to home base on it, anyway. Luis knows how to take care of himself. He’s in less danger than he would be if he stayed on this island. I agree with him about that.”
“Have you been to the police?” I said. “Surely if illegal poison was used…”
“No. Somehow I can’t imagine the authorities getting real upset over a dead marsh tacky. The rest is speculation. I think it’s island business. I think the island ought to see about it.”
“I just can’t believe this,” I said. “Who on this island would hurt Luis? Who would hurt that child? I know you think somebody in Clay’s organization is behind this, but I think you’re just plain wrong. That’s…that’s James Bond stuff. I don’t know anybody in the company who’s even capable of thinking like that.”
“Don’t you?”
I dropped my eyes.
“No. I don’t.”
But I did. I don’t know how I knew, but I did know.
“Well, listen, Caro, I hope you can scrape some of that mad back up, because I think you might need it,” Lottie said. “I have a message for you from that nitwit in your husband’s office, Shiny, or whatever her name is. She called me saying she couldn’t raise you either at the house or over here. Your phone’s off the hook. Said to tell you Clay was coming in this morning; he’s probably at the office now. I assume you’re going to want to share the little tidbit about the horses with him, aren’t you?”
“Maybe he knows,” I said. I did not want to have to tell Clay about the horses. I did not want, now, to have the conversation that we should have had almost a week ago. I just wanted to go to sleep, and then to get up and paint some more.
“I doubt it,” Lottie said. “Old motormouth would have blabbed it if he did. She practically told me what color his jockstrap was before I hung up on her.”
“I’ll go over there after lunch,” I said. “I really need to get some sleep now. I think I’ve painted through two nights.”
Ezra looked at me.
“I think you ought to go now, Caro,” he said.
I looked back at him. Somehow I did not want to ask him why.
They finished their coffee and left. Just before he got into the passenger side of Lottie’s truck, Ezra turned and looked up at me.
“The paintings are terrific, Caro,” he said. “You really got under our black hides. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I didn’t, either, I said to myself, watching the truck lurch down the rutted road under the live oaks. And then I went to dress and go back to Peacock’s Island and speak to my husband of things that would, I thought, wound us forever.
The anger came back when I crossed the bridge onto Peacock’s Island. It sprang up like a living flame when I saw the first Mercedes station wagon leaving the nursery, laden with mature bedding plants that would have cost a family in Dayclear a month’s food money. It licked higher at the sight of two groups of square, tanned women in little golf skirts and T-shirts and sun visors, piloting their private golf carts across the road from the harborside villas to the golf club. It spurted into my nose and throat like lava as I threaded my way around the lushly planted traffic circle that led into the main street of the tiny village center and saw the green-uniformed Peacock’s Island ground crew tearing out great clumps of blooming pansies and setting in their places flat after flat of rioting impatiens and mature ferns. Instant tropical paradise; why had I always thought it beautiful? My hot eyes wanted the tangled, littered coolness of the dank marshes and the forest; wanted, instead of this studied, expensive order, wildness and the vast amplitude of water and sky. By the time I pulled into the parking lot at the company’s headquarters, I was shimmering all over with rage.
“Well, goodness, Caro, where you been? We been lookin’ all over the place for you. Your wandering boy is back and rarin’ to see you, and here we thought you’d run off with the hired help or something.…”
Shawna was often familiar with me, when she thought she could get away with it, but she would not have dared go so far if she had not had an audience. It seemed to me that three-fourths of Clay’s female office staff lingered in the front office where her desk sat, finding this and that to do while they waited for me to come. Lottie was wrong, I knew; the office staff knew about the horses even if Clay did not. They must have known I would be furious.
“Shawna,” I said, smiling savagely at her, “eat a shit sandwich.”
I did not hear the gasps and the murmurs begin until I had reached Clay’s door, opened it, and gone in.
“…completely lost her mind,” I heard Shawna squawk as I slammed the door shut behind me.
Clay was standing at the window wall that overlooked the little enclosed courtyard behind his office. It had been planned to look like an old Charleston garden, sheltered with tabby and old brick walls and lushly planted with vines and shrubs and brilliant oleanders and cape jessamine and camellias. The camellias were out now, hanging from the great bushes like ripe, perfect fruit. The twisted trunk of the massive live oak that grew in the center of the garden was brilliant green with resurrection ferns. The little wrought-iron table against the back wall held the remains of a coffee and pastry breakfast for three or four people. I did not wonder who had shared it with Clay. I did not care. I knew before he turned to face me that I was going to say something that would change us both, would divide time. I could scarcely breathe around the anger.
He swung around. He needed a shave and looked a little faded, as he always did when he was very tired, but there was nothing of the past holiday’s joy or the pain of Puerto Rico on it. Just the habitual remoteness that the office called out in him, and a cool impatience. I knew that he hated slammed doors. I could not imagine that anyone had ever slammed this one before. He wore one of his immaculate gray tropical worsted suits and a fresh shirt. On the lapel of his coat was a gold pin shaped like a ten-gallon hat. It said, REMEMBER THE ALAMO.
I had never seen even a Rotary button on Clay’s person before. I stared. For some reason this object made me want to rip it off his coat, rip the coat off him, shake him, scream.
He looked down at the button and then back at me and made a small, fastidious face.
“The South Ward brass came back with us,” he said. “They’ve gone over to the island with Hayes. I guess I can take this thing off now. How are you, Caro?”
He did not call me “baby,” as he sometimes did. The smell of anger must be coming off me like smoke.
“I am not really very good right now, Clay,” I said, and was appalled to hear that my voice shook so that I could hardly get my words out. Where was all this rage coming from? This was Clay.…“While you were gone somebody poisoned the horses. The ones on the island. The mare—you know, Nissy, Kylie’s mare—died. Her colt just barely lived. We don’t know about the rest of the herd. It was botulism toxin. The vet is sure of that. Ezra thinks he’s going to be able to find out who bought the stuff, or stole it. Then we’ll know who…authorized it. You may know already, of course.”
He sat down slowly in his chair and put his hands flat on his desk, and leaned forward, staring at me. The color went out of his face.
“What are you saying?”
I just looked at him.
“Do you mean to tell me that you think that I…that I…authorized somebody to kill those horses? Is that what you think? Have you lost your mind? I would never on this earth…I didn’t know. God, Caro. God…”
He looked sick. It did not dampen the fire of my fury at all. The horrified face over that awful, silly Alamo pin made me angrier than I have ever been in my life. What right had he to mourn that old horse, if indeed that was what he was feeling, when what he planned for its island was so much worse than anything I could even imagine.…
“Don’t be a fool, Clay. Of course I know that you did not authorize it. I don’t think you had to authorize it. Do you remember, when we saw Becket, in Charleston? And Henry the Second said, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ and looked around at all his…his henchmen? He didn’t say, ‘Somebody go kill Thomas Becket’; he didn’t have to. They all knew what he meant. And pretty soon a couple of them got up and kind of slid out of the room and you knew…Who said it here, Clay? Somebody did. Somebody poisoned those horses in the name of this company. If you didn’t know about it, you ought to be able to figure out who did. I could give you a pretty good guess right now. He’s back over there right now with that bunch of snake-oil salesmen you plan to sell my island to. Okay, I came to tell you what I decided about that. Listen up. There’s not going to be any sale. There’s not going to be any golf course, or marina, or shopping center, or Gullah World over there. I’m not giving it to you. And—”
He got to his feet and came around the desk.
“Caro, let’s go home. We can talk about this at home. You’re upset about the horses; God, I don’t blame you. We’ll straighten it out, I promise. I could use some rest, too. We’ll have lunch out on the patio and then we’ll—”
I took a deep breath. I don’t want to say this, I thought, but I did say it. I only knew as I did that I meant it. At least for now, I meant every word of it. It almost broke my heart.
“I’m staying over at the island, Clay,” I said. “I can’t go…home…now. I don’t know when I can again. It just feels all of a sudden like I don’t belong here and never did. But the island…at least that’s mine. My place. Maybe in a little while I’ll feel differently, but right now…”
“No,” he said.
I stopped and looked at him. There was something strange and terrible in his voice. He had turned to the window again. I could see that his neck and shoulders were held as rigidly as a statue’s.
“No,” he said again. “It’s not your place. It never was, Caro. It’s still in my name. Technically, I can do whatever I want with it.”
I could not understand what he was saying.
“But I…I signed that thing,” I said. “You know, the transfer of title. Remember, you brought it home and I signed it, and you said that all that was left was for you to file it at the county courthouse.…”
My voice trailed off. He did not turn.
“You didn’t file it, did you?” I said.
“I thought I did. Or at least I thought it had been filed,” he said. “I gave it to Hayes to do; he’s the company lawyer, after all. He said he’d take care of it. But…he didn’t. I didn’t know that, Caro. All those years I thought it was yours, too. He only told me when the business about Calista came up and it looked like we were going under. He said…he said that something just told him not to file that thing, to hang on to that land for me. He said he knew he should have told me, but he didn’t think it would ever come up, and that no harm would be done by you thinking it was yours. And it wouldn’t have…if things had been different in Puerto Rico…”
My head swam as badly as I remembered it doing when I was first pregnant with Carter and could hardly take an unassisted step for three months. I sat down abruptly in Clay’s visitor’s chair. He still did not turn from the window.
“You should have told me,” I said.
“Yes. I should have. But by the time I knew, it looked as if we really might be able to come up with something you…could live with…and I could tell you then. I still thought so until this trip. Even with South Ward in the saddle, I thought my…vision for it could prevail. You always liked my vision for the Lowcountry land, Caro. Your grandfather understood it, and liked it.…”
“My grandfather would die of shame if he knew about any of this,” I said. “He would die. And your children. How do you think Kylie would feel about this? My God, I’m almost glad…”
I did not finish, but I saw the words hit home. He flinched slightly, but said nothing. Finally I got up and walked back to the door. I hoped dully that he would not turn around. I did not think I could bear to see the Alamo pin again. I did not think I could bear to see his face.
“Will you give it to me now?” I said, stopping at the door. I was amazed to hear that my voice was merely conversational.
“I…no. Caro, I can’t. Don’t you see? This will save us. This will save everything we’ve ever worked for, save everything I’ve ever built here, everything I’ve ever wanted for this land.…Don’t you see that? Don’t you see that it’s for your future, too? Can’t you see that most of it won’t even touch you over at your precious house?”
“I’ll ask you again. Will you deed it back to me?”
“I can’t do that,” he said. It was a whisper, a terrible sound. “I can’t just…not have anything. Not after having it all. Not after all this time. Not after what I’ve made here…”
“It was never yours,” I said. “You were a guest here from the first time you set foot on this island. I asked you here. I let you come. My grandfather let you come because of me. It’s a fine thing you’re doing to repay us, Clay.”
I went back out through the reception area. Neither Shawna nor any of the other women were there. The phones were ringing shrilly. I left them shrieking their frustration and went out into the sun. After the cool dimness of the office, it was blinding. Behind me, very faintly, I heard him calling me: “Caro! Caro!”
I don’t remember thinking much at all while I drove back to the island except, I don’t know how to be anything but Clay Venable’s wife and Carter and Kylie’s mother. That leaves one out of three. I wonder if it’s enough.
Enough for what, I could not have said.
I drove over to Dayclear and asked Janie to find Ezra Upchurch for me. She looked into my face and said nothing, just went out back and rang the big indigo bell. I sat out front and waited for him, and she did not join me. It was high noon; no one was about. I supposed that most of the people of Dayclear were having their lunches and perhaps their naps. A few, I knew, would be looking at the beginning soaps. Their stories, as they called them. For a moment I ached with the simple, one-celled wish to be one of them.
Ezra came from behind the settlement, grease on his hands and shirt. He still carried a wrench. I knew that something mechanical in Dayclear had to be fixed every day. I wondered what the settlement would do when Ezra concluded his business here and went back to Washington, or wherever his next crusade took him. I found that I could not imagine this stark, sunny little street without him.
He dropped down into the chair next to me.
“He told you about the deed,” he said. It was not a question.
I did not ask him how he knew. He told me, though.
“A deed’s a matter of public record,” he said. “I went and looked it up at the courthouse when I first knew what was going on over here. You always check your facts before you start a fight. I always knew that you really thought it was yours, though; I never thought you were just blowing smoke at us, to save your husband’s fanny. Nobody over here did. Most of them knew your grandfather. They knew you were his girl.”
“So…even when I was over here spouting off about nobody ever having to worry about anything again you all knew…Clay still owned it?”
“Yeah. But we knew how you felt. We still hoped you could change his mind about it. I take it that’s not the case, huh?”
“I don’t think it is, Ezra,” I said. I was so tired that I thought I would fall out of the chair and simply lie on the sun-warmed earth of the Bigginses’ storeyard until it swallowed me into the damp coolness under its surface.
“Okay,” Ezra said. “Now we ruin his ass.”