Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

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

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    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

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    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