13

When Ezra Upchurch set out to ruin an ass, he didn’t waste any time. By afternoon of the next day he had a press conference of national proportions set up for high noon two days later. Because he was Ezra Upchurch, the national media listened when his people in Washington called to announce it. Because he was Ezra Upchurch, most of them planned to attend. The Today Show was in North Carolina filming a series on black church bombings and would send a crew. All three major evening news shows scheduled reporters. Virtually all the national news magazines and many of the dailies would at least have stringers and photographers present. They would all meet at the bridge from Peacock’s over to the island. Ezra would meet them there with the residents of Dayclear, five or six other Gullah communities in the Lowcountry, and representatives of every significant environmental group that could mount a presence. They would march from Dayclear to the bridge, singing and holding hands as they had done, many of them, so many years before, in Selma.

Even in my fugue state of a pathetic grief, I knew that it would be irresistible. No matter if Clay could have managed to prevail over the natural tastelessness of South Ward and create something approaching environmental genius for the island, he would be dead meat now in the eyes of the nation, a despoiler of priceless wetlands and a fragile, ancient culture. It might not matter at all to South Ward, but it would, indeed, be the emotional ruin of Clay Venable.

Oh, Clay, I thought in such pure sorrow that it surprised me, when Sophia Bridges told me Ezra’s plans. What did you think would happen? Did you think the Sierra Club would give you a lifetime achievement award?

While I was still sitting in the chair in front of the Bigginses’s store the afternoon I confronted Clay, spent and silent, Auntie Tuesday came out of her cabin, toddled down the street on Janie’s arm, and brought me a giant pickle jar full of her tea.

“You take you some of this when you gits home,” she said, peering into my face. “Take you another cup befo’ you goes to bed. You sleep through without no hag-ridin’. You gon’ need yo’ sleep for a while. I fix you some fiddlehead broth tomorrow and send it over. This time I put some St. John in it. You gon’ need yo’ courage, too.”

“Auntie,” I said tiredly, “please don’t ever tell me whether you saw all that in fire or water.”

“Didn’t see nothin’ this time,” she said. “Ezra been talkin’ all along about callin’ in those news folks did he have to. I knowed from the look of you when I seen you out my window that he gon’ have to now. That gon’ be hard on you. Likely gon’ split you right in two. This he’p. It really will.”

I hugged her when I left with my pickle jar, holding her hard. She was almost a head shorter than I and so frail that I could feel her tiny bird’s ribs, but there was a strength in her that I could feel in my own hollowed and watery bones. I wished that I could simply move in with her and be cosseted, as she had cosseted Lita. But I knew that there was no place for me now in Dayclear. I was not the enemy. They all knew that. But I was married to him. I could not blame them if they wondered which loyalty would finally prevail.

So I drove slowly back to my island house and before the grief that hung like heavy, rotted fruit over my head could fall, I heated the tea and drank a cup. I could not handle much more right now than drowsiness, sleep. The knowledge of the betrayal needed time to work its way deep into the fibers of my mind and heart so that I knew its whole scope, its essential truth. Until that could happen, I knew that I would spend my time veering wildly from despair to denial, and back again. I had done it with Kylie. I would do it, too, now, with whatever might be left of my marriage. Better to drowse. Better still to sleep.

And I did. The smoky, slightly bitter tea eased the ache in my heart and the snarl in my head just enough so that I could read, and I stretched out on the sofa and lit my fire and pulled out the crumbling, yellowed old copy of The Jungle Book that had been Kylie’s favorite. The exotic, firelit world of Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera and Shere Khan swallowed me totally. I fell asleep before the fire and dreamed, not of my own threatened river and forest, but of a gold-green jungle where animals spoke and a child lived in a profound and sustaining harmony with them. When I awoke, it was almost ten the next morning, and I was cold and stiff and hungry, and the razor-sharp new pain was infinitesimally dulled.

It seemed to me that I should make a plan, a blueprint for living a new way, a map for getting through the next days in a new and diminished territory. So I showered and washed my hair and put on clean jeans and shirt and sat down on the deck with coffee and a fossilized bagel. I brought a legal pad and a pen with me for the outlining of my new life, but nothing came to me. Nothing at all. I could not think of a life without this island and this house, and I could not imagine one without Clay. It was a strange, suspended time, that morning. I both had a husband and did not; both had a home and did not. I would think, Well, we can live very well over here if we lose the Peacock’s house, and then think, But who is we? Or I would think, This is absurd; Clay will no more let me lose this place than he would let me go naked, or starve, and then realize that he was prepared to put the machinery of that loss into motion whenever he wished, and so far as I knew, would do it without delay. I felt nearly crazy, actually near insanity. I did not know how even to think of Clay in any terms but the ones in which I had always thought of him: my husband; the man I had always loved; the man I would grow old with; would, with luck, come to the end of my days with.

And yet, for all practical purposes, he had ended that life yesterday. Or had it been I? I did not know even the most basic truth of all this, and so I sat in the soft sun of late January and waited for what would come next.

It was Sophia Bridges, on Ezra’s motorcycle. She came roaring into the clearing and slewed smartly to a stop, dismounting in one single fluid motion of her long, elegant legs and unpacking a small sweet-grass basket from the saddlebag. I stared at her. She might as well have ridden up on a Komodo dragon. Even in my strange, suspended state, I realized how profoundly Sophia had changed on this island. There was little of the chilly, distant woman I had met in the kitchen of the guest house before Thanksgiving. She seemed almost totally a creation of this wild island now.

“I brought you some of Auntie’s magic soup,” she said, dropping down beside me in the rickety chair that had been my grandfather’s. “And I wanted to see how you are. You took a bad knock yesterday, Ezra says.”

A Southern woman is raised from birth to say when someone asks how she is, “Oh, fine, thank you for asking.” I remembered saying it even when the enormity of Kylie’s death was still new, and remembered the strange looks it evoked from the asker.

But now I simply said, “I think I’m in bad trouble, but I don’t know how I feel yet. It’s like being shot or something, and it hasn’t started hurting yet but you know it will any minute. I don’t even know how to describe it. But thanks for asking.”

She grinned wryly at that last, and stretched out her legs in the old faded jeans that were her island uniform.

“I think I know. I remember when Chris told me he was leaving me. It seemed like there ought to be some kind of book that would tell me how to feel and what to do about it. You just don’t know who or what you are anymore, do you?”

“I guess that’s it,” I said. “Mainly, I just can’t believe that what’s happened…really happened. I just can’t believe it.”

“I know. In my case, I didn’t know who I was anyway, so in the end it wasn’t so much different from the way I usually felt. But it must be awful for you. You never much doubted who you were, did you?”

“I guess I never much doubted what I was. I think there must be a difference that I’m just learning about. So much for teaching old dogs new tricks.”

“Well, I guess the main thing is not to do anything sudden,” she said. “Nothing’s cast in stone, is it? I mean, you haven’t decided really to leave or anything, have you? Things change so fast, Caro. They really do. That’s one thing I’ve finally learned. Things change.”

“I guess I haven’t decided anything,” I said. “But, Sophia…I don’t think I can live with…what will happen over here. I don’t think I can be around for that.”

“Then where would you go?”

I just looked at her. I had not gotten that far. She was right. Where would I go? The town house? And risk running into Hayes Howland or Lucy every time I put my head out my front door? See the line of green on the horizon that was the fringe of Peacock’s Island every time I walked on the Battery? No. Not the town house.

“I never got around to residential options,” I said.

“Neither did I, but one presented itself, anyway, and one will for you,” she said. “Maybe the first thing we both needed to learn was just to let go and let life do it.”

“Well,” I said, feeling absurd laughter start deep in my stomach, “life has done gone and done it.”

And we sat in the sun and laughed and laughed, like schoolgirls giddy with new spring and limitless possibility.

Presently she said, “I came to tell you what Ezra plans to do. He wanted to come tell you himself, he’s so proud of it all, and he was just sure that the jewel in the crown would be to have you march with them to meet the media. It’s the old Upchurch touch, doncha know. The piquant, poignant little coup de grace. When I got through telling him how many kinds of assholes he was he saw the wisdom of letting me come alone to tell you. It’s a good plan and I think it could work, but I can also see how it would just finish you off if you thought you had to be part of it. My advice to you is to go somewhere off-island…like maybe Jamaica or the U.S. Virgins, or Bhutan…until this is over. It’s going to hurt some folks you care about before it does any good, and whether it will stop the project or not is anybody’s guess. Mine would be that it might stop Clay but it probably won’t even make a dent in South Ward’s hide. But Ezra’s good, I’ll give him that. He’s done more with less to work with than this. It’s just that he is essentially a butthead and will never understand why you don’t want to see Clay pounded through the ground.”

“Do you understand?” I said.

“Of course I do, Caro,” she said softly. “I’ve loved a man. You don’t stop just because they’ve done a big awful. It may change the way you feel about them, but it doesn’t necessarily lessen it.”

I rubbed my eyes hard and said, “You better tell me what Ezra’s got cooking,” and she did.

When she was done, I said on a long breath, “My God. How could he do that in less than twenty-four hours?”

“His Washington staff did most of it,” she said, and it was only then that I remembered that Ezra Upchurch did not always wear overalls without a shirt and work under the punishing Lowcountry sun with a hoe or a wrench, or even a mule team.

“You ought to know, too, that I’ve resigned and that I’m going to be marching,” she said soberly.

“What…did Clay say?” I said.

“I don’t know. He’d gone to Charleston. I left a letter.”

“What will you do next?”

She shrugged and smiled. It was a peaceful smile.

“It will emerge,” she said.

“I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole,” I said, smiling back at her bleakly.

“Yeah. I meant it when I said you ought to get out of here for a few days. Get some perspective. I don’t see how you can, this close.”

But I found that I could not do that. I could see perfectly well the wisdom of her advice, but I could not seem to leave the island house. I did not feel anxious or afraid, and I was not terribly aware of anything beyond the dull, disbelieving grief I felt whenever I thought of Clay, but I still could not wander far from the house. So I cleaned. I put on all the West Coast jazz I could find—somehow symphonic music threatened my precarious hold on peace and baroque music seemed as if it would break my heart—and waded into cleaning my grandfather’s house.

I had not thought it really dirty, only cluttered with the residue of many years of island living, most of which I was loath to discard, since it had belonged to my grandfather. But with my microscopic new focus I saw years, decades, of the kind of dull, mucky patina that humidity and steady salt winds leave. I scrubbed and mopped and scoured and swept and vacuumed and changed ancient, sticky shelf paper and threw out jars of rock-hard garlic salt and clumped herbs and spices, and disinfected and polished and even did a little touch-up painting. I slept and started over the next day. When I was finally done, when I could find nothing else to rout out or touch up or scrub and my nails were broken to the quick and my muscles ached down to the bone and my body smelled of days-old sweat, I stopped and took a long shower and looked around me. The house shone. There was nothing more here that I could do. And the telephone had not rung.

I realized only then that for three days I had been waiting for Clay to call and say it was all a mistake.

I sat in the sunset of the night before Ezra’s great march and felt the first sly, promissory fingerings of a great grief and a greater rage, and called Janie Biggins and found out where Luis and Lita Cassells were staying on Edisto. And then I got into the Cherokee and drove through the translucent, fast-falling dusk until I was there. If anyone had asked me why, the best I could have done would be to say, I need to be with people who know who I am.

 

The Creekview Court had no view of Milton Creek, which I assumed to be the nearest body of water off Edisto Oak Lane. But it did have a view of the island supermarket on one end and a nice panorama of woods and marsh on the other. I don’t know what I had thought a trailer park would be like; the only image that came readily to mind at the words was the pitiful, flattened wreckage left behind by the South’s frequent, vicious, trailer-eating tornadoes. But the Creekview was as neat and pretty as any small village whose inhabitants had considerable pride of place, and looked to me to be about as permanent as most. It was apparently a mature park; the plantings and trees were sizable and beginning to green up, and there were towering camellia bushes blooming fervently around many of them. Instead of rusted aluminum camp chairs and rump-sprung junkers, there were gaily painted wooden outdoor furniture and big umbrellas and well-tended sedans and midsize sports utility vehicles, and a good number of bikes and skates spoke of children. In the luminous green afterglow from the sunset, lights in windows were cheerful and welcoming, and joggers and walkers and in-line skaters thronged the clean streets. A thin white paring of a new moon rode high in the sky, waiting to bloom. It reminded me of a village scene painted by a minor Dutch artist of the eighteenth century, naive and idealized. For a long moment I paused at a cross street and simply drank it in. I would have given anything, at that moment, to belong to a place like this, my arena small and landlocked, my house as movable as a turtle’s shell in case of calamity.

The small side street where Luis and Lita were staying had only four trailers, and since one of them had a huge, muddy black Harley-Davidson in front of it, I found it with no trouble. But I grimaced; I had not wanted to contend with Ezra Upchurch on this night. Only Lita. Only Luis.

I might have driven on past it, in fact, if at that moment Luis and Lita had not come around the side of the trailer from the back and spotted me. Lita had a big plastic bowl in her hands, which she tossed into the air when she saw me, and left to plop to earth while she streaked, squealing, toward the Cherokee. Luis held a cell phone to his ear, and when he saw me he smiled and said something rapidly into it and shoved it into his pocket and trotted behind her toward my car. So, feeling as shy as a teenager calling at a boys’ dormitory, I got out of the Jeep and went toward them across the tiny lawn.

Lita hit me around the knees and almost knocked me over, gurgling with laughter, and Luis caught her by the back of her T-shirt and restrained her while he put a big arm around my shoulders and drew me close in an exuberant hug.

“Ay, querida, but you are a sight for sore eyes,” he yelled. “And an answer to a prayer. And whatever else a brighter mind than mine could come up with. Come in. We’ve got real pizza from the real pizza place in the village. None of that frozen stuff for the likes of us.”

He walked me into the trailer, and I looked around, Lita hanging from my hand and chattering so fast in Spanish that she sounded like an Alvin and the Chipmunks recording. The inside was much more spacious than I would have thought, and sparsely furnished, but with obviously new furniture and some taste. A huge television set had pride of place, with a tomato-colored recliner and a rocking chair drawn up to it, and on a big red-plaid sofa there was a litter of books and toys and crayon drawings. On the small pine dining table was a welter of maps and charts and books and a half-empty bottle of red wine: Luis’s territory, obviously. The real pizza box sat on a shining Formica counter, smelling so good that I felt water gather in my mouth.

“We almost ate it before we went to feed the raccoons, but Lita wanted to wait,” Luis said. “She knew something I didn’t, obviously.”

“Told you she’d come,” Lita said, rolling her bright almond eyes at her grandfather. “Told you.”

“So you did. Fourteen million times,” he said. “She’s wanted to call you for at least three days. She was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find us. But I thought you might need a little time to yourself.…”

Of course, Ezra would have told him about the deed to the island, and the march, all of it.

“Where’s Ezra?” I said. “I saw his machine outside.”

“He swapped it for my truck for the night,” Luis said, grinning. “He’s got stuff to haul for the big doings tomorrow, and I’ve always wanted to get that hawg off by myself.”

“And have you?”

“Yep. Lita and I went to the beach this afternoon. It was great. Just like Easy Rider. So. Not that you need a reason, and I hope it’s purely because you’ve missed us, but I suspect there’s more to this than a social call. Can we do something for you?”

His words were light, but his voice was gentle and his face concerned, and I felt a prickle of weak tears in my eyes, and turned away.

“Not really,” I said. “I just was…at loose ends, sort of, and I guess…I think I might have been a little lonesome out there in the marsh. I’m awfully used to seeing this monkey face around by now.”

And I gave Lita’s hand a squeeze. She squeezed back, hard.

“A bad time for you, Caro, and that’s no joke,” Luis said soberly. “A huge betrayal. A huge loss. A true evil. I would have given a lot to be able to prevent it.”

“It wasn’t really deliberate, Luis,” I said, surprising myself. “I know Clay feels bad about it, too. I think…he just can’t see any other way right now.”

“Then he’s a worse fool than I thought he was. But I wasn’t talking about Clay. I know the poor stupid bastard’s hurting. Look what he stands to lose…No, I meant our friend Hayes. Goebbels. Iago. He who smiles and smiles, and is a villain. Of course Mengele should have told you the minute he found out about that deed, and fired Iago’s ass, and taken you over there with him to watch him personally fire that sucker. But his head’s so fucked up by all those years of playing God that he really thinks he created the heavens and the earth, and now he’s got to save his holy empire or he won’t get to be God anymore. He might have come around, given time, but ol’ Iago did him out of any leeway he had. He’s no fool, Iago. He always knew who would inherit the earth.”

“Who?”

“South Ward. You start screwing around with the wilderness and South Ward is two steps behind you, sure as gun’s iron. I’ve always known that. Those folks over in Dayclear have always known that. We know that at best we’re guests on that land. Nobody owns it but the gators and the crabs and the coons.”

“And the panther,” Lita piped. “Don’t forget the panther, Abuelo!”

I look at Luis in surprise.

“We heard him, Lita and I. We heard him early in the morning, right before we found the mare and her baby. I’d heard of him, of course, but this time I heard that sucker. Lita did, too. You don’t forget that. She’s right. I reckon that’s who owns this island. Pity Mengele forgot that.”

I turned my head away, thinking of the night we had heard the panther, Clay and I. It had been the beginning of it all, of everything.

“Clay heard him, too, once,” I said. It was almost a whisper. I thought my throat would burst with pain.

“He forgets fast then,” Luis said. “That cat ought to put his snout right down Mengele’s britches and roar. Look, Caro, let me put a proposition to you. Not that kind, though don’t I wish. It’s this. I just got a call from…a person in Columbia, somebody I’ve been looking for but wasn’t sure existed. If he’s willing to do what he says he will, we’ve got this botulism business nailed. Name of seller, name of buyer, dates, places, the whole nine yards. It could lift that march tomorrow right up into the stratosphere. It could put the blame right where it ought to be, too…and that ought to get ol’ Clay baby off the hook a little with the media. But I’m going to have to leave right now and go meet him; he won’t talk over the telephone, and he won’t talk at all unless he sees the color of my cash first. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of somebody to stay with Lita; I don’t want her over on the island until this is all over, and I don’t know anybody over here who could come on such short notice. Lottie will come get her first thing in the morning and take her to her studio; she’s keeping Mark Bridges, too, until the crowd’s dispersed, but Lottie’s…tied up tonight. I’d get Auntie, but she, by God, wants to march and I think she should. So…do you think you could possibly baby-sit for me, just till Lottie gets here in the morning? I’ll probably be going straight to the bridge from Columbia. I wouldn’t ask you except that I don’t like thinking of you over there by yourself in that house, just sitting there and waiting for us to barbecue Clay right under your nose. In fact, I think you ought to be off the island completely till tomorrow night. Somebody in that pack of press jackals is bound to get wind of where you are and come beating on your door. I was going to tell Lottie to go get you in the morning and take you over to her studio till the dust settles, anyway. Could you stay here, do you think? It’s a lot to ask of you, I know, to help us sink your husband.…”

He looked intently into my face and then looked away.

“It was a shitty idea,” he said. “I’m sorry, Caro. Please forget I even mentioned it. I’m as bad as Ezra, trying to get you to march with us.…Fuck.”

“No,” I heard myself say. “I’d love to stay with Lita. You need to do this. Do it for the folks at Dayclear and the ponies; do it for Nissy and Yambi. You’re right. If it was Hayes, God help him, then everybody ought to know it was. Apparently I don’t know my husband as well as I thought I did, but I do know that he would never on this earth harm those horses, or let anybody do it for him. Do it for me if you can’t do it for Clay. Please, Luis.”

He took a deep breath and nodded. He turned to Lita.

“Will you stay with Caro and not give her any grief about going to bed, and not pester her for more than three stories?”

“I promise,” Lita said. “She can have my bed and I’ll sleep on the sofa, like you do. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. You said fuck, Abuelo.”

“I did, and I should know better. I owe the jar a nickel. Go cut you and Caro a piece of pizza while she walks me out to the Harley. Look, Lita, I’m going to wear Uncle Ezra’s helmet and leather jacket; will I look like James Dean, do you think?”

“Who’s that?”

“Ay,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I am too old for this. But I can’t wait to straddle that hawg and eat that asphalt up. Think of it, Caro, a breath-held crowd waiting at the bridge, and I come thundering in on that thing with the proof of the pudding in my pocket…What more could a man ask?”

“Brains enough to be careful?” I ventured. “I don’t like the sound of this clandestine stuff, Luis. If your guy knows that kind of stuff, he’s a criminal himself. Are you meeting him in a safe place?”

“Deep in the sewers of Columbia at midnight,” he said. “No, really. I’m meeting him at the VFW hut in the middle of the parking lot, with a fais-do-do going on inside. He’s going to wear a red carnation in his navel and I’m going to carry a rose in my teeth. The worst danger is that he’ll try to kiss me, and I can always claim sexual harassment.”

“Then hit the road, fool,” I said as we walked out into the night. Dark had fallen and the thin curl of moon had swollen and leaned closer. Someone nearby had planted Confederate jasmine; the sweet, tender smell almost took my breath. Even this far inland, the kiss of salt lay on the wet little night wind.

He pulled on the helmet and shrugged into the jacket. He should have looked ludicrous beyond words, but he did not; he looked enormous and rock-solid and somehow both boyish and dangerous, going off on this extravagant quest to save something not his own. But then, had that not been almost his whole life?

“Do you remember, you told me once to find what I would die for and then live for it?” I said. “What is it you would die for, Luis? What is it you live for? What is it you ride this silly thing to Columbia at night for?”

He was not smiling when he looked at me.

“For the quaint, old-fashioned notion that people ought to be able to live wherever the fuck they choose,” he said. “I ought to be able to go back to Cuba if I want to. That little girl in there at least ought to have a choice. The people in Dayclear should, too. You, too, for that matter. A great deal of this business is so that you can live on that island of yours if you want to. Didn’t you know that?”

“I guess I didn’t, really,” I said, around the cold salt lump in my throat.

He reached out and touched my hair.

“I don’t know what will happen with you,” he said. “I do know that things change. I think things may change for you. I don’t know what that means yet. But when I get back we will talk about it. Can we do that, Caro? Can we talk about that?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He stood still with his hand on my head, and then he leaned over and kissed me very chastely and softly on the forehead.

“Sleep well with my little girl,” he said. “And I, I will ride like the wind until my great steed Rosinante brings me back to you.”

“Get out of here.” I laughed, choking on it.

He swung himself into the seat of the Harley and stomped down on the gas pedal. It roared into life, throbbing and bucking to get away, to ride out into the vast black night, to spit out the wind. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx, jerked back his thumb in the old WWII pilot’s salute, and gunned the Harley. It leaped forward, roaring, and I watched it as he leaned into the turn at the bottom of the street, raised a hand, and was gone.

When I got back into the trailer, the pizza was waiting, smoking hot, on two flowered Melamine plates, and The Lion King was beginning on the TV screen.

“I always work the VCR,” Lita said, settling herself into the rocking chair with her plate of pizza. “It makes Abuelo say fuck, and then he has to put a nickel in the jar. It’s half-full now.”

“I’ll bet it is,” I said, beginning to laugh. And that is what we had for our supper, Estrellita Esteban and I: pepperoni pizza from the real pizza place, with no anchovies, and laughter, and a golden lion cub growing through pain and despair into lordliness.

 

Lottie came so early the next morning that I was still in Luis’s old seersucker robe, putting on coffee, and Lita was still asleep. She had had a restless night, muttering and whimpering, and I had heard her from the sofa bed in the little living room and gone in to her, and finally, when I could neither fully wake her nor quiet her, crawled in beside her. She had subsided then, but had rolled against me and clung there, and I was tired and sweaty when the first graying of the dark outside the high little windows came. I got up carefully, so as not to wake her, and found the robe hanging behind the bathroom door and put it on over my underwear, and went into the kitchen. The robe smelled of Luis and somehow of peat moss, an intimate, earthy smell. I drew it close around me in the morning chill.

When I had peered out to see who was banging so peremptorily on the trailer door and let Lottie in, she grinned, in spite of what was obviously one of her more advanced hangovers.

“Looks better on you than it does on me,” she said, indicating the robe. I felt myself color, and she said, “Oh, for God’s sake. I know he isn’t here. He called me on his way out of town last night and told me you were staying, and to come over and get you all going early so you wouldn’t run into reporters at the bridge. They’re sure to know your car, and they know about Lita. He doesn’t want them near either of you. You ought to know, too, that he and I are what they customarily call just good friends now.”

“God, Lottie, I don’t care…”

“Just so you know.”

I gave her coffee while I went to wake Lita. She was fussy and petulant, and clung to me. I had never heard her whine before, but her manner this morning was that of a much younger child, and I automatically felt her forehead to see if she had a fever. She did not. Well, she was only a small child after all; she was entitled to a small regression now and then. I had never really seen her in any state but her customary cheeky, sunny one.

“Got up on the wrong side of the bed, did we?” I said, and she looked in fretful puzzlement at each side of her double bed.

“It’s just an expression that means fussy,” I said. “That’s okay. I do it, too, sometimes. Let’s get some breakfast in you. Lottie’s here to take you over to her studio with Mark. You all are going to have a great time. You might not know it, but it’s a real honor. She doesn’t invite many people over there. She’s a famous artist, you know.”

She was unimpressed.

“Don’t want to go,” she said, scrubbing fitfully at her eyes with her fists. “Want to go with you. And I want to go with Abuelo and ride the hawg in the march. I want to go home, too.”

“Well, you can’t do all three at the same time,” I said in the tone I remembered employing with Carter and Kylie when total unreason ruled. “You were all excited about going to Lottie’s last night, to play with Mark. You can’t come with me this morning, but we’ll do something tomorrow maybe, or the next day. Where’s home, Lita?”

I should not have had to ask, and felt a frisson of anger.

“Over there,” she said sullenly, jerking her thumb back toward the road south. I knew that she meant the island. What would happen when Luis took her away from there, as he was bound to do sooner or later? Where would home be then?

“How about we go see Yambi tomorrow?” I said. “I hear he’s been asking for you.”

“Promise?”

“I’ll do my best. It’s up to your grandfather.”

“He’ll let me,” she said, some of her sunniness returning. I thought that he would, too.

Lottie made appalling cinnamon toast while I got Lita into her miniature jeans and T-shirt and running shoes. When we were ready to go, Lottie said, “Why don’t you pick out a few toys to take with you?” and Lita scampered off to gather her treasures.

Lottie turned to me.

“I heard about the island. The deed thing, I mean. I know somebody who does freelance hits, and in case you think I’m kidding, I’m not. He would probably do Clay and Hayes for the price of one. Are you going to get through this, Caro? Why don’t you come back with us today? It’s not going to be pleasant, even over where you are. You’re bound to hear some of it, and there’s always the possibility that some of those assholes will track you down at the house. The patrician, betrayed, environmentalist wife…you’re honey for the flies. Just for today? Luis and Ezra will keep them away from you after this, but they’ll be tied up today.…”

“I can take care of myself,” I said. “I think I could easily shoot any son of a bitch who comes over there with a camera. I wouldn’t mind a bit. I don’t need Ezra and Luis to fight my battles for me.”

“Well, don’t shoot anybody. Ain’t none of them worth jail. Save the bullets for Hayes. Somebody ought to do it, sure enough. That poor old mare…What will you do today then?”

“I think I might be ready to paint. If I can do that, I won’t hear anything from the bridge, and I won’t think about it.”

“Okay, sweetie,” she said, hugging me. She felt solid and warm and smelled of bourbon. It was somehow comforting, and then I realized it was my grandfather’s smell.

“I’m coming by after I take the children back to Dayclear tonight, though,” she said. “I’m either going to spend the night with you or drag you back to my place. There are nights it’s okay to be alone, but tonight is not one of them.”

“We’ll see,” I said. The idea of Lottie’s formidable presence on this looming night was oddly appealing. When it was over, something very basic to the fabric of my life would have changed. I knew that. I simply was not sure what.

It was still early when I pulled out onto 174 and drove south toward the bridge over to Peacock’s. The sky was still pink behind the line of black pines to the east, and there was little traffic in the opposite direction. The islanders who worked in Charleston would just be leaving now. I thought that I would get home and take a long, hot, sulfurous shower and make myself some real coffee and dig out my camera and take the Whaler far up the creek. The eleven o’clock news last night had spoken of a powerful cold front working its way east through Alabama and Georgia, and predicted strong thunderstorms and high winds by the evening of the next day. I knew that meant a return, however briefly, of cold weather. We were not done with winter yet. This might be the last of the enchanted gold-green light on the marshes for several weeks. I remembered a poem Robert Frost had written about that first gilded green of spring. It ended, “Nothing gold can stay.”

The line almost brought tears to my eyes as I drove. Why couldn’t the gold stay? Was it too much to ask?

I crossed over to Peacock’s Island and resolutely looked neither right nor left as I headed west, so that I would not have to see the company’s offices or the artful stand of tropical plantings that led to the beach road and our house. I stepped on the gas when I got through the traffic circle; I had no wish to meet the first of the media gathered at the bridge over to the island. But when I approached it, it lay empty and dreaming in the first sun, only a couple of Gullah crabbers tossing their lines over into the black water. I lifted a hand and smiled, and they smiled back. I knew them but did not remember their names. I knew that they lived in Dayclear, though. I wondered how much longer they would be free to crab in this little estuary.

I flicked on the radio and found the station in Charleston that played baroque music in the early mornings. “Spring” from The Four Seasons uncurled into the Jeep, and I smiled. I turned off onto my dirt road and swept around the curve to the live oak hammock in a shower of glittering notes.

Clay’s Jaguar was parked under the trees. Even as my lips framed the word “shit,” my heart leaped like a gaffed mullet in my chest.

I stopped the Jeep a little way from the Jaguar and looked around. I saw no evidence that he was in the house; it was still dark, and no smoke came from the chimney. I did not see him on the hammock or out on the boardwalk to the dock, either. I sat still, trying to decide how I would think about this, how I would act when I saw him. I could not even imagine why he was here, on this of all days.

I decided on Dorothy Parker.

“What fresh hell is this?” I said aloud, in what I hoped was a coolly amused voice, as I got out of the Jeep.

No one answered me but an outraged squirrel in the live oak over my head.

I was almost up to the steps when I heard the faint putt-putt of the Whaler out on the creek. I went down to the edge of the boardwalk over the reeds and dark water and stood watching as it came out of the glitter of the morning sun and glided to rest against the dock. He got out and stood looking toward me. He was bathed in the dancing light, as he had been the first time I saw him, and he was as tall and flame-tipped and lithe as he had ever been then. This was not fair. I felt a great, simple, abject grief start in my chest.

“I want that back,” I whispered aloud. “Oh, I want that back.”

I went to meet him.

I was perhaps fifteen feet away from him before his face came clear out of the dazzle, and I gasped aloud and stopped. Clay had been crying. His long face was as red and congested as Carter’s when he was a toddler and just coming out of a spell of weeping; his eyes were bloodshot and slitted, and the silver scum of dried tears glittered in the silvery stubble on his chin and cheeks. His hair had not been combed, and was wildly tangled from the wind on the Whaler.

I had never seen Clay cry. Not like this. I simply looked at him.

“I couldn’t find you,” he said, and his lips shook, and his voice broke.

“I wasn’t here,” I said stupidly.

He shook his head hard, and tears flew out into the warming air. His face contorted and he turned it away.

“I know. I know you were over at Cassells’s trailer. I went over there, but the lights were out.…”

“He wasn’t there, Clay,” I said. “He went to Columbia. I was staying with Lita.”

“I know. I didn’t mean I thought you…I just…I just wanted to see your car, to know you were safe somewhere. I thought you’d have called by now.…I came over here to wait for you.”

As if by agreement, we began to walk back toward the house. The boardwalk squeaked and swayed under our weight. We walked side by side, but we did not touch. None of this felt at all real. I might have been watching a movie of myself, walking along a boardwalk on a spring morning with a man who could not stop crying. A man I knew only slightly, from another time.

“How did…how did you know where I was?” I said, more to break the silence than anything. I simply could not get a sense that this was my husband.

“Ezra Upchurch came to see me last night,” he said. “He told me. Among other things. Christ, if that wasn’t a scene…it’s two in the morning and Ezra Upchurch is knocking on the door yelling for me to open up. I’m surprised somebody didn’t call the cops.”

“Ezra?” I said stupidly. “I didn’t know you knew Ezra.”

“I guess he figured it was time he introduced himself,” Clay said, and to my surprise began to laugh. It was not so far removed from tears, that laugh, but it was a laugh. I laughed, too. I could not imagine why.

At the beginning of the boardwalk my grandfather had built a pair of facing cypress benches, weathered now into a silky silver gray, and when we reached them he sagged onto one of them and I sat down on the other. We looked at each other across the boardwalk where we had met, all those years ago.

“Ah, God, Caro,” he said presently. “So much shit. So much misery. So much…waste. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t. Well, I wasn’t thinking, of course…Listen, can we talk a little bit? Will you just listen to me without saying anything? I don’t mean you should…change your mind about anything, but if you’d just listen…”

“Clay, I will always listen to you,” I said. “When did I not?”

“Well, do you think…could you make some coffee? I couldn’t find the cord to the pot.…”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go to the house.”

All the way across the grass and up the steps my heart was hammering as if it would explode in my chest. What was this? What could this possibly mean?

I made the coffee while he took a shower. I saw that he had slept on the sofa under a welter of quilts. The fire was cold and sour, and I relit it. It was really too warm for it, but I wanted the intimate hiss and snicker of it, and the dancing light. The living room was still in darkness, from the sheltering oaks. I turned on the lamps and brought out a tray of coffee and some of the Little Debbies that were Esau and Janie Biggins’s sole gesture toward breakfast food.

He came into the room in an old pair of madras shorts and a sweatshirt. His feet were bare and his hair was wet and standing straight up in spikes from the towel. The sweatshirt was a horror of Carter’s that said, RUGBY PLAYERS EAT THEIR DEAD. I was sure that Clay had no idea it said anything at all. I felt wild, braying laughter behind the tears in my chest. I bit my lips and waited.

“All right,” he said on a long, exhaled breath. “Listen. The press thing at the bridge…the march, you know…that’s off. Ezra’s Washington people have been calling all night. And the project, the development, you know, the Dayclear thing…that’s off, too. I pulled out of it. I called the SouthWard guys at the guest house while Ezra was still at the house and told them to hit the road. He wouldn’t leave until I’d given him the deed and he’d torn it up. Burned it, too. He’s one tough cookie, Ezra Upchurch. And he still wouldn’t leave until I’d called Hayes and fired him. That did it, though. After that we broke out the Glenfiddich and drank until about four, and then he left to get things straightened out with the press, and I went on over to Edisto, and then came back here. I hadn’t been out on the water for fifteen minutes before you came.”

He stopped and looked at me. I could not think of a single thing on earth to say to him.

“Why did you fire Hayes?” I said finally.

“Suspicion of equicide,” my husband said, and began to laugh. I did, too. We sat in the growing light of this day I had dreaded and laughed and howled and wept and sobbed and laughed some more, and pounded our thighs with our fists, and when we finally subsided, Clay began to cry again.

I moved over to the sofa and sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulder, very tentatively. I felt that I was trying to comfort a total stranger, someone I had met on an airplane or something, who had become suddenly inconsolable. It was almost…unseemly.

“Did you really do those things, Clay?” I said finally. “Did all that really happen?”

His face was buried in his hands, but he nodded.

I sat back and thought about that.

“Then…nothing is going to happen over here. There isn’t going to be anything built on Dayclear?”

He nodded.

“Do you mean for now, or ever? You still own it; will you change your mind somewhere along the way? Will we go through this again?”

He raised his head and looked at me. It was painful to look at him.

“Caro,” he said, “Last night, when I finally lay down to try to sleep, I thought Kylie was here. I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I heard her laughing, that I heard her walking outside; I’d know her step anywhere. I thought I heard her…talking, but I couldn’t hear what she said. And when I got up to see, I heard…I heard the panther. And I knew then that if I did anything to this island I would be haunted for the rest of my life by it. I knew that it was theirs, not mine, yours and theirs, and your grandfather’s, and the Dayclear folks…I knew that I never had belonged here and never would, not the way all of you did and do. They told me that, that panther and my dead baby. I know it’s not possible, but that is what I heard. I started crying then. If I’m losing my mind…then so be it.”

I felt joy and peace flood into my heart like an artesian well.

“If you’re losing you mind, then I am, too,” I said. “I’ve heard her here. I’ve talked to her. I’ve thought I saw her. And Luis and Lita heard the panther the morning…that Nissy died. I think…I think…that either that panther must be about one hundred and twenty-five years old or this island knows what we need to hear, and somehow…sees that we do. In any case, it doesn’t matter. If you heard them, then maybe it can be your island, too.”

He shook his head, no.

“But I’d like…I’d like to stay here on it with you, if you think you could let me do that. I thought you’d gone, Caro. I didn’t think you would come back. I didn’t think I could live with that.”

I reached out and touched a tear track on his face. He covered my hand with his and pressed it into his bristled cheek.

“We’ll lose everything, won’t we?” I said, not pulling away. “If you don’t do Dayclear? The company, the house…Is that why you’re crying? Surely, Clay, there’s something else you can do, some other way you can put your gift to work…and I don’t care about the other stuff. I can live over here for the rest of my life. I was going to; I thought that was what I would do. I can sell my paintings. We could manage.…”

He shook his head and grinned, a small, watery grin.

“We’ll do okay,” he said. “I’ll find somebody decent to sell the company to, somebody who’ll be generous; there have been good offers along the way. The Peacock Island Plantation Company is not chopped liver. I have a ton of stock. We could keep the house if you wanted to, but somehow I don’t think I could live there now, and I was sure you wouldn’t want to. Carter may want to be a part of it, and we can work that out with the new owners. I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff; it’s history. I want to see if I can earn my right to be part of this over here. That will be enough to hold me a few thousand years. No, what got to me was…I guess the thought of Kylie, and how she would feel about what I had become, and then that poor goddamned horse, and the colt…Kylie loved those horses…and Hayes. Hayes was my friend, Caro. Hayes was my first friend in this place, almost my first friend period.…”

“Did he admit…that he had anything to do with the horses?”

“He didn’t say he didn’t. He just blustered and threatened and yelled; he really lost it when I told him there wasn’t going to be any project. Said I was ruining him. Said I had betrayed him, after everything he’d done for me. I remembered what you said about Becket…I think he did it, or had it done. God help him for that.”

“There may be proof by now that he was behind it, Clay,” I said. “That was why Luis went to Columbia. He has a contact there who’s going to tell him, who can name names and places and all that. He was going to bring it back with him for the press conference. You should have it soon.…”

He turned his face away.

“I don’t need it. I think I knew when you told me. Hayes…something has eaten Hayes up inside, like a worm. There’s nothing left but rottenness. I don’t know why I never saw it happening. He’s going with South Ward, by the way; it’s been in the works for months. He hit me with that, too. He was to deliver the project and then go in as chief counsel and a managing partner. He’d have been out of Peacock’s before the dust settled. The deal was that he’d be able to stay in Charleston, too; Hayes had it all figured out.”

“Well, he’ll have to refigure then.…”

“No, I think they’ll still take him. Oh, he won’t be chief anything, and he’ll have to move to Atlanta, and that will kill him and Lucy, and he’ll never make anywhere near the money he stood to make this way…but Hayes is good about finding venture capital. He ought to be able to smell out enough for South Ward so that they’ll keep him. I think, for Hayes, living in a suburb of Atlanta near a strip shopping mall and being a middle-level money cruncher for South Ward will be worse than jail. Maybe there’s some justice in the world after all. I’d like to think there’s a little, after what I’ve done.…”

“But if you’ve pulled out of the Dayclear project, what harm have you done?” I said, reaching out to turn him around so that he faced me. His shoulder felt familiar again all of a sudden, muscle and bone that I knew.

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

“Ezra came for another reason,” he whispered.

“Tell me,” I said.

And that is when he took both my hands in his cold ones, and told me that Luis Cassells had spun the Harley off a long curve halfway between Edisto and Columbia near midnight the night before, and crashed into a tree, and died, the state patrol thought, on impact.