Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Read Free Book Online Page A

in, Caro?” Hayes said, and my face
    flamed at the amusement in his voice.
    “Yes. Please come on up to the house. Granddaddy’s
    having his sundowner. He’ll love some

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    company. He’s always saying he’ll never make a
    drinker out of me. Well, not that he’d really want to,
    of course…thank you,” I said, remembering the roses,
    and caught my platform heel in a crack of the dock,
    and lurched to one knee. The roses sailed over the
    weathered cypress railing and disappeared into the sea
    of reeds and black water.
    There was a small silence, and then Clay Venable
    said, “A simple ‘no thank you’ would have sufficed.”
    I froze in mortification, and then the amusement
    under his words penetrated my fog of misery, and I
    began to laugh. He laughed, too, and helped me to
    my feet, and Hayes laughed, and after that it was all
    right. By the time he had been introduced to my
    grandfather and the bourbon had been poured, and
    we sat on the screened porch looking out over the sil-
    vering marsh, Clay Venable was as much one of us as
    Hayes or any of the other young men from Charleston
    and the islands that my grandfather was accustomed
    to greeting when he encountered them hunting or
    fishing or canoeing on the wild tidal creeks and inlets
    of Peacock’s Island. It was common knowledge that
    the island belonged to my grandfather, but it was also
    common knowledge that he did not mind the occasion-
    al sporting visitor, so long as they did not disturb the
    pristine tranquillity of the marsh and woods. Indeed,
    he had known most

    Low Country / 49
    of them since they were small boys and came to Pea-
    cock’s with their fathers.
    Dark fell, the sudden thick, furry blackness of the
    Lowcountry marshes, unpricked by any lights at all
    except the kerosene lantern that sat on a table on the
    porch and the citronella candles I had lit. The house
    had electricity, but my grandfather disliked it, and often
    went days without lighting an electric lamp. He had
    no such qualms about other appliances, and happily
    used his small, battered refrigerator and the old stove
    and even the jerry-rigged washer and dryer that sat on
    the other end of the porch. But he loved lamplight,
    and it is what I use mostly when I am at the house
    even to this day. I find that it calls him back to me as
    little else does.
    I don’t remember much of what we talked about:
    Hayes’s job at one of the ubiquitous law firms on
    Broad Street, I think, and how restless he felt there,
    closed away from the beaches and marshes and rivers
    and creeks where so many Charleston boys spent great
    chunks of their boyhood. My studies at Converse, and
    the painting that I was doing on the island that sum-
    mer. The herd of wild ponies that had chomped and
    stomped its stolid way around the back part of the is-
    land since I could remember. The monster bull gator
    my grandfather had seen the day before, and the pan-
    ther that he swore he had heard scream in the deep
    blacknesses of several

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    past nights. The drought that was decimating the coast
    that summer and how badly my grandfather’s year-
    round property in McClellanville was suffering from
    it. I did not think he was unduly upset about the
    drought in McClellanville; since my grandmother had
    died several years before, he had spent more and more
    of his time at the marsh house, and left it now largely
    to look after his banking business in Charleston, or to
    make a run to a hardware or grocery store. He had
    even, the winter before, put in a big cast-iron stove in
    the bedroom where he slept, so that, with the huge
    stone fireplace in the living area, the house was habit-
    able through the brief, icy spasms of the Lowcountry
    winter.
    “Don’t you get lonesome out here?” I asked him
    once.
    “No,” he had said in honest surprise. “Why would
    I? Everywhere you look something alive is slapping
    the water or shiverin’ the bushes. And when you