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

run
    out of the live ones, there’s plenty of not-so-live ones,
    let me tell you. Many’s the night I’ve passed in the
    company of somebody who left these parts a hundred,
    two hundred years ago.”
    I knew that he was teasing me, but only with the
    top part of my mind. The old, bottom part nodded
    sagely: Yes. I can see that that’s so. I have always felt
    that there were many levels of beings on Peacock’s Is-
    land, many more souls than cur

    Low Country / 51
    rently wear flesh. It is not, on the main, a bad feeling
    at all.
    Finally, that night, we got around to Clay Venable.
    I knew that my grandfather was as curious about him
    as I was, but his natural, grave good manners decreed
    that he make Clay feel at home before asking him to
    share much of himself.
    “I don’t think you’re native to these parts, but you
    seem to have taken to them right well,” he said mildly
    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