Low Country (7 page)

to Clay after a while. They were on their second or

third leisurely bourbons, and off in the trees the katy-

dids and marsh peepers had started their evening

chorus. Overhead the huge, swollen stars flowered in

the hot night.

“No, I come from hill country, in Indiana, around

Bloomington. I’d never seen the ocean till I got to

Virginia and came home with Hayes. My folks were

red-dirt farmers, poor as church mice. After that…well,

I guess I was sunk. It was like I was born in the wrong

place and only just found the right one when I got

down here. There’s never been any other part of the

world I wanted to see, not after I saw this. I went back

to Indiana after I graduated and worked at an insurance

agency until I could save enough to pay off my student

loans and get a little ahead. Then I headed down here

like an arrow from a bow. I don’t know yet what I’ll

be doing, but I’ll be doing it here. I do know that.”

52 / Anne Rivers Siddons

It was 1972, and a looming recession threatened

hundreds of thousands of workers across the country.

Small businesses were closing; larger ones were cutting

back or at the very least freezing their hiring. Around

Charleston, the strictures of an energy crisis and un-

available gasoline slowed the flood of tourist dollars

to a trickle. It was a disaster of a year, all told, and yet

Clay Venable sat on my grandfather’s porch and spoke

calmly of a limitless future in the Lowcountry that was

an assured fact, a done deal. I believed him absolutely,

even before Hayes Howland laughed ruefully and said,

“Lest you think he’s blowing smoke rings, at least three

guys at Marguerite MacMillan’s as much as offered

him jobs tonight. I don’t know what it is he’s got, but

whatever, this old boy’s gon’ do all right for himself

down here.”

My grandfather laughed. It was a friendly sound, a

laugh offered by one equal to another.

“What would you do if you had your druthers,

Clay?” he said.

Clay did not hesitate.

“I’d take all this”—and he gestured around him at

the marsh and the night—“and I’d make sure that

nothing ever changed the basic…nature of it, the sense

of it, like it is now…and I’d make it available to a few

very special people who would see it for what it is, and

love it for that, and want to live here. And no one else,

ever.”

Low Country / 53

Hayes snorted, and my grandfather said, “You

mean…a subdivision, or something? Develop it?”

His voice was still mild and interested, but I knew

how he felt about the marshes and the islands of the

Lowcountry. My heart sank. I might have known Clay

Venable was too perfect; there had to be something

wrong.…

“What I have in mind is about as far from a subdivi-

sion development as it’s possible to get,” Clay said,

looking intently at my grandfather. In the lamplight

his blue eyes burned. “In my…place…the land and the

water and the wildlife would come first, people second.

Not a house, not a hedge, not a fireplug would go up

that did not blend so perfectly into the wild that you

had to look twice to see it. Not an alligator would be

relocated; not a raccoon or a deer would be run out.

I would never forget who was here first. And I would

have no one in my place who did not feel the same

way.”

We were silent for a moment.

“Never heard of a place like that,” my grandfather

said finally.

“There’s never been one,” Clay Venable said. “But

there will be, and it will be mine, and it will be some-

where on this coast. I know that.”

“Take more money than God’s got,” my grandfather

said.

“I can get the money,” Clay said. “If I can get

54 / Anne Rivers Siddons

the right piece of land, I can get the money.”

“Don’t you have it backwards?” My grandfather

chuckled. “How you gon’ get a chunk of prime ocean-

front or marshland without any money? Not much of

that left. And another thing…any empty land I can

think of around here hasn’t got mainland access. Not

an automobile bridge between here and Hilton Head.

How you gon’ find this wild land with a bridge already

built?”

“Because I’ve got a master plan,” Clay Venable said.

“It’s as detailed and complete as it’s humanly possible

to make it. I’ve been working on it for three years, ever

since I got out of college. Since before then, really;

since the second or third time I came down here with

Hayes. I’ve gotten two or three of the best young archi-

tects on the East Coast to work on it, strictly gratis,

and city planners and environmental specialists and

lawyers, and I’ve gotten the Sierra Club people and

the Coastal Conservancy folks to put in their two cents’

worth, and the U.S. Corps of Engineers. None of them

would take a penny. It will work. It’s a beautiful plan.

It’s a beautiful concept. It’s ready to go. I am absolutely

sure that if the right people see it, the land and the

bridge and then the money will follow. I
know
that. I

don’t mind working at…whatever…for a few years

until I can get it going.”

Low Country / 55

My grandfather took a long swig of bourbon and

rattled the ice in his glass.

“Where is this plan?” he said.

“In a bank vault back in Charleston. And there’s a

copy at my bank at home in Bloomington.”

“Who’s seen it?”

“Nobody yet. Except the guys who’ve worked on it,

of course, and they’re sworn to secrecy. They’ll be

partners, so I don’t worry about them letting it out.

Outside of them, nobody.”

“I’ll say,” Hayes said. “Not only have I not seen it,

I haven’t heard the first word about it. Jesus, Clay…I

had no idea! Why didn’t you tell me, show it to me?

I can help you with it.…”

“It’s not time yet. When it’s time, I will. I wasn’t

hiding it from you, Hayes.”

“I’d like to see a thing like that,” my grandfather said,

as if to no one in particular. “I reckon that would be

something to see.”

“I could bring it out tomorrow or one day soon,”

Clay Venable said, and smiled, a swift, transforming

smile that I had not seen before. My breath stopped.

“Why don’t you do that?” my grandfather said.

“Me, too?” Hayes said.

“Not yet. But soon. I promise,” Clay said.

“Well, I like that! I take you to the party of

56 / Anne Rivers Siddons

the year at the numero uno hostess’s house in

Charleston, and introduce you to the movers and

shakers, most of whom are falling all over themselves

to offer you jobs, and you won’t let me see your…vil-

lage Eden,” Hayes groused. I thought that he was only

partly kidding.

“You’ll see it before anybody in Charleston,” Clay

said, giving Hayes the smile. Hayes nodded, apparently

satisfied.

“Would you like to see it, Miss Aubrey?” Clay said

to me.

I jumped. He had not really looked at me since we

had settled ourselves on the porch. His attention had

been bent upon my grandfather.

“Very much,” I said, and my unused voice cracked,

and I cleared my throat. “I would very much like to

see it. If you can do all that and still keep the

land…untouched, as you say…it would be something

to see indeed.”

I realized that I sounded adversarial, and started to

amend my words, and then did not. I did not think

what he proposed was possible, and I did not want to

see his master plan and find that, after all, it was an

ordinary subdivision that would clump on stucco feet

through the rich, fragile coastal land and leave little of

it intact.

“Then maybe tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow would be fine,” my grandfather said.

“You boys come out about midafternoon and I’ll take

you out in the Whaler. Let Clay run

Low Country / 57

Alligator Alley and see if he still wants to save the

gators.”

“I’m a working man myself,” Hayes said, “but I know

Clay would enjoy Alligator Alley. What a great idea,

Mr. Aubrey. That’s just what you all should do. Only

why not take the canoe? See ’em better that way.”

He came at three the next afternoon in the same out-

board they had brought yesterday. I recognized it now

as the one Shem Cutler, over on the tip of Edisto,

sometimes rented out to hunters or crabbers. I was not

waiting for him on the dock—I would have died

first—but I was watching from the porch of the house.

It is set on stilts, a former hunting shack grown large

and rambling over the years, and you can see a long

way from it. He was not nearly as proficient as Hayes

with the boat. I could see that he was coming in too

fast, and he hit the dock with a resounding smack,

bounced off it, and had to balance himself with an oar

when the resulting watery circles rocked him crazily.

I smiled to myself. Ever since he had spoken about his

impossibly idyllic Lowcountry community I had felt

vaguely and sullenly resentful of him, the dazzle of his

initial appearance safely dissipated. This place, this is-

land, belonged to us, my grandfather and me, and the

small settlement of Gullah Negroes over in Dayclear,

at the other end of the island, and the

58 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ponies and the gators and the ghosts and all the other

beings, quick and dead, who had their roots here. Who

was this man, this upstart, land-bound Yankee, to come

down here and tell us that he was going to transform

it?

I was obscurely pleased to see, as he walked carefully

down the listing boardwalk toward the house, that in

the full afternoon light he did not look golden at all,

not impossibly slim and tipped with flame. His hair

was merely brown, the silverbrown of a mouse’s fur,

almost the same shade as his face and hands, and he

was more skinny than slender. I could see, too, now

that he wore an ordinary work shirt with the sleeves

rolled up and not a suit of radiant white linen, that the

tan stopped at his wrists, as a farmer’s did, and that

his legs, in a pair of faded cut-off jeans, were the

greenish-white of a fish’s belly.

“The mosquitoes are going to eat him alive before

we’ve left the dock,” I said with satisfaction to my

grandfather, who stood beside me, and was surprised

at myself. Where was this venom coming from? I had

been ready to follow him to hell or Bloomington when

I first met him.

“Young feller got under your skin, has he?” My

grandfather grinned, and I had to grin back. It had

long been a joke between us that as soon as a young

man showed substantial interest in me, my own evap-

orated like dew in the sun. A fair number of them had,

over the years; I had my

Low Country / 59

mother’s vivid darkness and my unremembered father’s

fine-bladed features, and knew that they all added up,

somehow, to more than they should have. I was not

particularly vain of my looks, Miss South Carolina

notwithstanding; good looks had not, after all, gotten

my mother very much except a young husband who

left us when I was four and another who was, to me,

as remote as a photograph. In my experience, a man

who came in the front door was that much closer to

the back one. I solved that by leaving first. I could see

that I was doing it again. My grandfather was right.

Clay Venable had gotten further under my hide in a

shorter time than anyone ever had.

Just the same I was glad that he had proved to be

an ordinary, skinny, milk-pale Yankee after all. I had

nothing to fear from him. And then he raised his head

and saw us on the porch and smiled, and the ordinar-

iness vanished like smoke in the wind, like a disguise

that he had cast off. My heart flopped, fishlike, in my

chest.

“Shit,” I whispered.

My grandfather laughed aloud.

Peacock’s Island is a small barrier island in St. Helena’s

Sound, fitting like a loose stopper in the bottleneck

formed by Edisto and Otter Islands to the north, Har-

bor and Hunting Islands to the south, and the shallow

bay created by the conflu

60 / Anne Rivers Siddons

ence of the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers to

the west. It lies in a great, 350,000-acre wilderness

called the Ace Basin, an estuarine ecosystem so rich in

layers upon layers of life, so fertile and green and

secret, so very old, so totally set apart from the world

of men and machines—and yet so close among

them—that there is literally no other place remotely

like it on earth. Other areas in the Lowcountry that

were once this pristine have irrevocably gone over to

man now, and cannot be reclaimed, but a combination

of private and public agencies have set their teeth and

shoulders to safeguard the Ace, and now protect sizable

swatches of it.

The bottom 91,000 acres of the Ace Basin are tidal