Low Country (2 page)

going. It is a devilish seesaw, but it provides a sort of

balance.

I looked away from him and out the French windows

to the lawn and the seawall, and the beach and sea

beyond. When Clay first began to develop Peacock’s

Island as a resort and permanent home community,

he decided that we must certainly live there if anyone

else could be hoped to, and so he chose the best lot

on the island and had this house built for us. It
is

beautiful; even now, when I cannot look at the ocean

without darkness and sickness starting in my stomach,

I have to admit that it is a lovely house and an even

lovelier situation, a perfect marriage of shore and sea.

It was the first of the famous Peacock Island Plantation

houses to be built, the model for that rambling, unob-

trusive, graceful style of architecture that has become

rather standard for beach and marsh houses in the

various Lowcountry resort developments now. The

architect who began it all is credited with our house,

but it was Clay, all those years ago, who leaned over

his shoulder for long hours at the drafting table, seeing

in his mind’s eye what the future homes of Peacock

Island Plantation should be, and prodding until Dudley

found the proper architectural metaphor for his vision.

They dot the Lowcountry like beautiful fungi now, lying

close along the shoreline under the twisted old live

oaks and

8 / Anne Rivers Siddons

among the dark, cool thickets fringing the marshes on

the landward sides of the barrier islands. They vary,

of course; there is room for individual taste and inter-

pretation, but no house is built in Peacock Island

Plantation that does not meet the company’s rigid

design codes and so there is nothing intrusive here,

nothing raw or ragged or incongruous, like you might

see in other, newer and less carefully provenanced de-

velopments. Clay was adamant about that when he

was young and new to the business and stood to lose

a lot of money with his lofty design standards, and he

has never loosened or amended them in this or any

other of his projects. He likes to say that his family has

loved and lived the Peacock’s Island life ever since its

beginning. And so we have, or at least lived it, for the

past twenty years, when he moved us here from the

cheerful suburb full of new ranch houses and young

professional families where we started out, in Colum-

bia.

Our son, Carter, was only a year old when we came

to the island. Kylie was born here. They were children

of the sea and beach and marshes; it was, to them, a

known world, taken entirely for granted. It was, to me,

like living permanently on a kind of extended vacation.

I was born in Greenville and grew up in a succession

of small South Carolina towns, all long hours from the

coast, and came to the Lowcountry only during the

summers, to visit my Aubrey grandparents. I

Low Country / 9

still feel that way about living here. Sometimes I wake

up before dawn, when it is too early to see that peculiar

nacreous gray morning light that the beach and sea

send backward to the land, when the wind is down

and the surf is so sluggish that you cannot hear it past

the dune line, and I think, Have I overslept? I didn’t

hear the garbage trucks. I’m going to be late for

school.…

My lucky children, I have often thought, to gauge

the rhythm of their days by surf and wind and the

dawn chorus of a hundred different shorebirds, not

ever to have known anything else. It seems exotic to

me, foreign somehow. I used to say this to them, when

they were very small, to try to explain this strange,

suspended feeling that sometimes woke me in the

earliest hours of the day, but I could never do so, at

least not to Carter.

“That’s dumb,” he would say. “I don’t see how you

can still feel that way when you’ve been living here so

long. This is better than garbage trucks and traffic any

day. This is better than anything.”

Carter, my pragmatist, so like Clay. To this day, I

do not think anything out of his earliest childhood

stalks him in the dark.

Ah, but Kylie…Kylie always knew. How, I don’t

know, but she did. She would ask endlessly for the

story: “Tell about what you heard in the morning when

you were little, Mama. Tell about the garbage trucks

and the lawn

10 / Anne Rivers Siddons

mowers and the carpool horns…”

My small towns did not have noise ordinances like

the island does; I realized early on that to Kylie, my

childhood morning cacophony of manmade hubbub

was as exotic as this profound, mystical sea-silence still

is to me.

“Why do you want to hear that?” I would say. “This

is much nicer. This is nature pure and simple; very few

people are lucky enough just to hear natural sounds

when they wake up.”

But she was unpersuaded.

“Will you take me to see the garbagemen some-

times?” she would say, over and over. “Will you take

me where I can hear a carpool horn?”

Kylie and Carter went to the island country day

school, and were picked up at the head of our lane by

a smart, quiet little school bus painted in the muted

Peacock’s Island tan and green.

Finally I gave in: “All right,” I said. “Okay. We’ll go

spend a weekend in Columbia sometime soon, and

you can see the garbagemen and hear the carpool

horns.”

We never did that, though. Somehow, we just never

did.…

The sea at the horizon line was banked solid with

angry purple clouds this morning, as it often is in au-

tumn, but as I sat staring at it, the clouds fissured and

broke and a spear of cold, silvery sunlight streaked

through, stabbing down at the sea and lighting the

tossing gray to the

Low Country / 11

strange, stormy pewter of November. At the same

moment the ocean wind freshened, lifting the fine, dun-

colored sand from the tops of the primary dunes and

swirling it spectrally into the air, rattling the drying

palm fronds at the far edge of the lawn where the

boardwalk down through the dunes to the sea began,

stirring the moss on the live oaks that sheltered the

house. It seemed for a moment that everything was in

swirling, shimmering motion: air, sea, land, swimming

in diffused light, drowning in silver. I looked away,

back to the breakfast table and then up at Clay. On

such a day, I knew, my stomach would roil queasily

with the shifting light and wind, and my heart would

beat queerly and thickly with it, until the wind dropped

at sunset and the benevolent golden light of sunset

spilled in from the west.

It was days like these that I most needed to be over

on the island.

I speak of it as if it were a different island; we all do,

though it is not, really. Technically, the island is the

back third of Peacock’s Island, the westward third, the

marsh third. It is separated from the larger bulk of

Peacock’s Island proper by a tidal estuary that is full

only twice a day; during the other times you could

wade through the ankle-deep muck in the empty, cor-

rugated rivulet that cuts the island like a snake, though

no one wants to. The mud is deep, and stinks of

12 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ancient livings and dyings. You can better cross it, as

I do, on a sturdy if raffish wooden bridge just wide

and stout enough to hold a truck or a Jeep; the island

is never truly cut off from the larger bulk of Peacock’s.

It might as well be, though. It is another place en-

tirely, eons older, wilder by millennia. I don’t think it

ever had a name, since it is of course a part of the lar-

ger mass. In my lifetime, in my time here, it has always

been known simply as “the island,” just as the larger,

more hospitable two-thirds of it has been known as

Peacock’s Island, usually shortened to Peacock’s. I

think the inept old pirate for whom it is named would

have agreed with the practice. If legend is true, he had

no truck with the marsh-bound back third of the island,

either, except to leave some of his hapless live captives

there staked out for the alligators and the wild pigs

and the savage, swarming insects and to dispose of the

dead ones in the black, silent tidal creeks and rivers

for the nourishment of who knows what. It is shifting,

unquiet land, and it is no wonder to me that the un-

happy victims of Jonathan Peacock are said to be un-

quiet, too, stumping about and murmuring querulously

in the close, still nights. The Gullahs of Dayclear are

said to be as familiar with them as they are with the

terrible duppies and other assorted haunts who came

with them in their chains to these shores, and on the

whole, per

Low Country / 13

haps, prefer them. An unhappy ghost can be cajoled,

soothed, propitiated, but there is no reasoning with a

duppy.

Clay was still looking at me, studying my face as

calmly and gravely as he had been studying the
Wall

Street Journal
. Waiting, I knew.

“I’m almost through with the studies for the new

painting,” I said. “I’ve got everything but the light on

the Inland Waterway at sunset. It’s different from

anywhere else; it’s deeper there, and the water moves

a lot more. That changes the light entirely. I really want

to get that. I think a night or two would do it. I’ll take

the camcorder and see if I can get enough of the change

from sunset to full night so I can finish it back here, if

you need me. Is there something special?”

At first, when I started to spend time over on the is-

land by myself, I used as an excuse the creation of a

series of paintings of the marshes in all seasons and at

all times of day. It was believable, if barely; I had not,

then, painted in twenty years, but I did a lot of it once,

and I have two solid years of training in fine arts at

Converse. I was good then, good enough so that when

I quit school in my junior year to marry Clay Venable,

several of my instructors begged me to wait, begged

me to get my degree first and then go somewhere spe-

cialized, like the Art Institute of Chicago, where two

of them had taught, for further serious study. But I did

not, and after Carter

14 / Anne Rivers Siddons

was born, I did not paint anymore. I never seemed to

miss it, not consciously, and yet, when I pulled it out

to excuse my flights to the island and began to actually

dabble once more in oils and watercolors and pastels,

it felt right and easy, supremely satisfying. After a while

I was spending a great deal of time there trying to catch

the fey, flickering faces and moods of the marshes and

estuaries; it became important to me to do it as well

as I could, to give the island its full due. After a longer

while, even I could tell that the work I was doing was

good, and getting better. Now, when I went to the is-

land, it was not only that I was leaving Peacock’s, I

was going to something that was important to me on

many levels.

Clay knew that, even if he did not approve. I was

good enough so that the handful of small galleries on

Peacock’s and a few on some of the larger islands, and

even one in Charleston, carried my work. He could

not argue that it was self-indulgence alone that drew

me back and back to the island. And to be fair, I knew

that he was proud of me.

He had another weapon in his arsenal, though, and

I knew now, without his saying so, that he was about

to employ it. About five years ago he had asked me,

almost casually, if I would involve myself with the

young families who came to the Plantation to work for

the company, to act as a sort of chatelaine-hostess-

troubleshooter-

Low Country / 15

confidante to them, especially the young women, most

of whom were wives.

“You know,” he said, “give dinner parties for them

when they get here so they can get to know the others.

Show them around, put them in the hands of the right

real estate people so they won’t end up spending

money they can’t afford for decent housing. Tell them

about doctors and dentists and schools and play

groups, and such. Maybe take the wives over to

Charleston once or twice a month, show them the best

shops and galleries and the right hair places, take them

to lunch at the Yacht Club or somewhere flossy and

fun. Just listen to them. It’s not an easy adjustment for

some of them. Some of them have never been closer

to the ocean than a couple of weeks in the summers.

I’m aware that it can get sort of cliquey and ingrown

here; especially if they’re slated to stay here for a long

time. You could be a godsend to them.”

Clay’s company now encompasses properties as far

away as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands; each