Sweetwater Creek (2 page)

And Emily had.

Two years later, when he was seventeen and Emily was ten, Buddy wet himself in his chair. Emily looked on in horror and sympathy as the pale urine dripped from the seat and soaked into the rug.

“I’ll clean it up before anybody sees it,” she said, and got up to scurry for towels and a mop.

Buddy did not answer. In his late teens his features had grown chiseled and high-planed like his father’s, and crowned with the same thick wheat hair. Now his face was white and blank as he stared straight ahead.

“Get out of here, Emily,” he said, without looking at her. Emily got.

The next day, while Emily was at school and the men out with the dogs, Buddy somehow managed to shoot himself in the head with the antique Purdey shotgun Walter had given him on his sixteenth birthday. It was a legendary gun, Walter said, made in England just after the turn of the nineteenth century, for an unremembered Englishman named Carter, and had belonged to the oldest son in the Carter line ever since, passed on down over the years. Her father had coveted the gun, Emily saw, caressing and polishing it, hefting it to his shoulder, tracing with his fingers the intricate, age-smoothed design of ducks and swans and graceful reeds carved into the silver stock.

Buddy cared nothing for it. After perfunctory thanks, he had put the gun away somewhere, and Emily had not seen it again. But he had obviously kept it at hand, for with it Buddy charged his old foe and cheated it.

He left one note for his father and the boys, and since no one ever spoke of it, Emily never knew what he had said. He had left her one, too. In it were lines from another poem he had once read her, one by John Donne, that he said was the bravest and most gloriously human poem ever written.

It read, in part,

At the bottom he had scrawled, “I got him, Emily.”

After his funeral service, which Emily remembered none of forever after, her father and brothers took him to the old Carter family graveyard, in a grove of moss-scarred live oaks on a hummock in the far marsh. Emily took Aengus to her room and into her bed and held him through the afternoon and night and into the next day while he shivered and whined. Emily herself did not cry for Buddy; she never did. She simply stopped reading.

That evening Walter took the legendary Purdey down to the great curve where Sweetwater Creek ran deep and dark, and threw it in.

After that, Emily haunted the big, shabby house looking for a place to be. She went once or twice into Buddy’s room, but Cleta, weeping, had cleaned it antiseptically and put all Buddy’s personal things away, and there was nothing of him there, and consequently, nothing of her. The still, silent room and dead hearth frightened her. She began to spend all her time, except for family meals, with the dogs.

Sweetwater Plantation bred and trained exceptionally fine Boykins descended from the original stock founded in Boykin, South Carolina. Walter had grown up there, working furiously to lever himself out of the hardscrabble farm existence his family led, and much of his work was in the homes and gardens and fields of people who bred and raised the chunky little bronze dogs. He came to know the myths and the realities of the dog: that it had originated with a stray puppy who followed a prominent citizen home from church one day; that it had been bred and interbred specifically to serve the needs of the Lowcountry waterfowl hunters. It was large enough and had enough stamina to retrieve for hours in icy water, small enough to fit neatly into a small boat, often with a blind attached. “The dog that won’t rock the boat,” was the dog’s unofficial slogan.

The little dog had touches of this and that in his ancestry: Chesapeake Bay retriever, American water spaniel, cocker and springer. It turned out that the new breed was naturally affectionate in the house and joyfully enthusiastic in the fields and marshes. His dense, curly coat protected him from icy waters, his autumn-brown color effectively camouflaged him, and his stub of a tail did not disturb undergrowth and give away the position of the blind-hidden boats. He was equally at home flushing small waterfowl and upland birds: doves, turkeys, and ducks. He was even proficient at flushing deer. By the time Walter Parmenter met the Boykin spaniel, the dog had become a favorite with sportsmen up and down the eastern seaboard.

Walter was enchanted with the little dogs, and watched and listened and learned. He mucked out kennels, fed and watered, exercised, and soon was allowed to help train the spaniels. When he went away on scholarship to a small agricultural college upstate he took his own Boykin, given to him by a grateful breeder, and he studied a great deal about animal husbandry and care. He entered field trials and hunt tests all over the South, with his own carefully trained spaniel. What time he had left over he and his Boykin hunted. By the time he met and married Caroline Rutledge Carter of Sweetwater Plantation, he was determined to be a breeder and trainer of extraordinary Boykin spaniels, and over the years he had become just that. He was at heart a simple and single-minded man, and he put all the focus and energy he had into the dogs. They flourished, bringing a steady, barely adequate income to the farm. Walter’s family, keenly aware that they were second fiddle at all times to a little brown spaniel, did not.

When Emily came among the field Boykins, in flight from the dead house, Walter had a number of breeding bitches and sires, a constant supply of new puppies, well-built and well-kept kennels and runs, carefully groomed field facilities, and part-time workers and trainers. Emily had always loved the small puppies and the beautiful mothers and sires, but she had not been allowed to make pets of the kennel dogs lest it spoil their hunting temperaments. Avenger and Sumter were devoted only to her older brothers; they wagged their stumpy tails at Emily when she petted them, and sometimes licked her face. But there was no question that their hearts belonged to Daddy. Aengus was the most she knew of Boykins, and when Buddy died Aengus went to the family of a breeder in North Carolina who was seeking to improve his stock.

Buddy had not allowed his dog to be trained for hunting, but Aengus came from magnificent hunting stock and was as close to breed standard as Sweetwater had. Walter got a princely sum for him. Emily and Aengus both cried when the North Carolina truck took him away, but her father had assured Emily impatiently that Aengus was going to the best dog’s life imaginable.

“No, he isn’t,” Emily said under her breath. “He’s already had that.”

She had been spending her afternoons exclusively with the kennel dogs and puppies for three weeks before Walter took notice of her. The day he saw her in the little fenced training paddock with a small puppy, he went out to chide her for making pets of pups that were destined to be gundogs and that only. And then stopped still by the fence to watch her.

She was sitting on the dried grass with Ginger, a twelve-week-old of particularly opinionated temperament. Walter had been planning to start her on the basics the following week, and was rather dreading it; he anticipated a long struggle with the beautiful puppy over who was going to obey whom about what. The first thing a hunting puppy learns is to sit on command, and in Walter’s way this entailed a good bit of pushing the baby’s behind to the ground while saying firmly, “Hup!” and then repeating the process over and over.

Emily, however, sat still on the ground and leaned her head close to that of the attentive puppy. She did not move, nor, for a long time, did Ginger. Girl and dog simply looked at each other out of hazel and golden eyes, respectively.

Then Emily stood, and Ginger got up also, and stood attentively in front of her. Emily nodded. Ginger sat down. And did not get up.

Finally Emily nodded and Ginger stood, waiting quietly in front of Emily. Emily nodded again, and again Ginger sat down and waited.

Walter walked over to his daughter as casually as he could and said, “Can you do that again?”

“I think so,” said Emily, and turned to the puppy once more, and nodded.

Ginger stood up.

“So…have you been working with Ginger for long?” her father said. “Because you know our Boykins are trained our own way. You ought not be meddling with their first lessons.”

“Just today,” Emily said, looking at her feet. Her father’s impatience with her was worse, on the whole, than his indifference.

“What are you saying to her? Are you whispering?” Walter said.

“Nothing,” Emily mumbled.

“Well, then, how do you get her to sit and stay like that?”

“I just think it at her,” Emily said. “And I listen to see if she understands. And then I think at her what she should do. Ginger is real good at it. I don’t have to think it more than once, usually. She didn’t want much to stay, but it was because it bored her. I told her I really, really wanted her to do it. And she did. She’s a nice dog.”

“Emily, that’s just wishful thinking, or something,” Walter said nervously. “It’s coincidence. You can’t think a dog into learning anything. You have to show them, over and over, and you have to do it firmly. Ginger just happened to want to sit down.”

“No, she didn’t,” Emily said stubbornly. “I told you. It really bored her at first.”

Her father looked at her silently.

“Would you like to help me train Ginger?” he said. “We could start with walking to heel, since she seems to have caught on to sitting and staying. We could do a little bit tomorrow; I could show you how, and then maybe you could carry on with it by yourself.”

“Yes,” Emily said, looking hard at him to see if he meant it.

The next afternoon Emily and Ginger were waiting when Walter came into the paddock carrying a slip-cord leash, a choke chain, and a whistle.

“What’s all that stuff for?” Emily said suspiciously.

“Walking to heel is complicated. It takes a lot of repetition, especially with a dog like Ginger. Let’s see which of the collars she’ll work best with, and then I’ll start, and you can watch.”

“Can I think with her a little while first?” Emily said. “She doesn’t like all that stuff you’ve got, and I don’t think she’s going to let you put it on her.”

Walter stared at his daughter and the stiffly erect puppy, and then gestured helplessly.

“By all means. Think away,” he said.

Again Emily sat down in front of Ginger, and Ginger sat still and looked at her, head cocked. Presently Emily stood up and turned her back on Ginger and nodded. She walked away. Ginger got up agreeably and trotted along just behind her left heel. Emily turned to the right and left; Ginger turned, too. They made small circles in the paddock, then they turned and came back to Walter. Emily nodded. Ginger sat.

By her tenth birthday Emily was regularly starting the Sweetwater Boykins off, and even taking a few of them through some of the more difficult steps: introduction to gunfire (with a cap pistol), single marked retrieves, double retrieves, water work. “But I won’t do birds, live or dead,” Emily said. “I won’t teach them to hunt.”

“We’ll take them from there. You’ve given them a nice start,” Walter said, and it was as near praise from him as Emily had ever gotten. Emily’s part in the education of the Sweetwater Boykins was not mentioned outside the house. Her father continued to smile modestly at the compliments his impeccably bred and trained spaniels received, and sold them like hotcakes.

On her tenth birthday, Emily went out to the bitches’ kennels to select her puppy. The newest litter was just three weeks old, and her mind and heart were made up instantly when a scrawny, ill-favored puppy tumbled out of the nest and toddled over to her and sat on her foot.

“That’s no hunting spaniel,” her brothers jeered. “That’s a hound dog.”

So Emily named him Elvis, and took the puppy to her room, and fell as irretrievably in love as she ever would in her life. Girl and dog were two halves of a whole, two chambers of one heart. The swirling black abyss that Buddy had left was almost filled. But only almost.

He still spoke to her sometimes. Not audibly, but through the words of poets she had pushed far down and slammed a door on when he died. Sometimes they broke through, and then Emily knew that Buddy was with her.

On this night the fast-falling dark caught them, and the moon was riding high and white when Emily turned to leave the creek bank and hummock. She stood in the darkness of the live oak grove for a moment, to watch the tapestry of silver tidal creeks and icy, gilded marsh. The bank down to the little beach where the dolphins slid was pure vermeil, every oyster clump and cypress stump and bleached shell inked in black.

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.” The words slid whole and perfect into her mind. She smiled slightly, a smile tightened with pain and softened with love.

“Show-off,” she whispered, and turned to leave the hummock for the narrow path through the reeds and fields toward home.

Elvis had gone ahead of her, and stood in the moonlight on the path, motionless and waiting. The wash of moonlight turned his chestnut curls to fire. Love smote Emily, pierced through her so quickly that it almost brought her to her knees. Love for the amber eyes on hers. Love for the tumbled curls. Pure love.

“I love you, dog!” she called, and he wagged his nubbin of a tail, and girl and dog started for home.

In point of fact, Elvis’s curls in the moonlight were the exact color of her mother’s as she stood in the dim light of the overhead globe in the farmhouse foyer, the last time Emmy ever saw her. But it was a long time before she realized that.

THERE WAS AN OIL PAINTING
at Sweetwater Plantation over the dusty carved and gouged mantlepiece in the dining room. It was dark and brooding, and romantic in the extreme, Emily always thought. A pale, radiant orb that must have been the moon sailed high over the shallow-hipped roof, and beyond it the Wadmalaw River shimmered like quicksilver. Groups of graceful black men and women strolled about on the circular front drive, arm in arm, their mouths open, faces lifted up to a second-floor balcony, where a man and woman in eighteenth-century dress stood. Obviously, the black people were happy slaves, singing in the twilight to their master and mistress. Small black children tumbled and rolled in the smooth grass. Gigantic roses glowed palely in the twilight. The Spanish moss in the live oaks in the great allée were ghostly under the high moon.

“It must be very old. It’s a real primitive,” Emily said on Thanksgiving afternoon, as she was dusting the heavy gold frame. Buddy had told her about the early primitive limners who came to Charleston in the late
1600
s to paint the houses and families of the rich planters. She liked showing off her knowledge.

She only dusted the painting twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. The Parmenters took virtually all their meals in the small breakfast room off the cavernous kitchen. It had once been a ladies’ morning room, Walter had told her, but no ladies had morninged in it for a very long time. Still, Emily loved the name and called it the morning room when there was no one around to correct her. The Sweetwater Plantation she lived in now had only a cluttered breakfast room in need of paint, but the Sweetwater of the painting undoubtedly had a morning room.

“I’ve always loved Sweetwater best at twilight,” Emily said to her aunt Jenny, who was polishing the silver service she had brought from her own house for the feast. It was, in fact,
1847
Rogers Brothers silver plate, and her aunt had bought it for herself after she divorced her feckless, philandering husband Truman, but Emily did not know that. She loved the sight of the ornate silver, gleaming in the light of the tall white tapers at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. It spoke of a birthright that was, perhaps, only temporarily lost.

Walter Parmenter loved it, too; he never failed to say at these holiday dinners that the Carter girls had always known how to set a fine table, and he had always meant to replace the family silver before Emily grew up. Everyone would nod pleasantly but no one spoke; they all knew that Caroline Carter Parmenter had taken the scant store of silver with her when she left. Emily did not even remember it. She did not want the silver replaced; she had no intention of presiding over a fine table with just-bought silver. Silver should come with the house and be as old as the family name.

“That’s not twilight,” her aunt said acidly. “It’s years and years of smoke from the blasted chimney. The painting is of the house in bright sunlight, and it never had one single rose. My crazy aunt Harriet painted it in
1950
. Your great aunt. The only other thing she ever painted was a pitcher of buttermilk with a zinnia stuck in it.”

Emily did not look at Jenny Raiford. She knew that it was not an early limner’s work, nor twilight, nor any of the other things that she kept in her head and heart. The knowledge did not stop the needing, though. Emily needed Sweetwater to be as it was in the painting.

“It could have been, though,” she muttered stubbornly. “It could have, sometime before we had it. Daddy said it was a great rice plantation once, and then a sea island cotton plantation. He said we have the best river access on this island. You can ship anything anywhere from our landing. I bet…”

“Emily,” her aunt said more softly. “You know it was never a great plantation. You know that. Maybe it could have been once, but the people who built it managed to sink everything into rice just when cotton was coming in, and then the next crowd forgot about the old rice gates and flooded the cotton crop and left, and the next crowd—the Olivers, I think—just let it sit fallow except for a kitchen garden and a cow pasture, until Grandaddy Carter bought it in
1925
. Planted it in soybeans for a cash crop and put in the barns and stables. He was going to make it into one of the great horse farms in the Lowcountry. Of course, he didn’t figure on
1929
. I guess nobody down here did. It’s been the way it is now ever since, except for the dogs, of course. Why do you keep on with this great plantation business?”

Emily did turn to look at her aunt then. She smiled unwillingly in answer to Jenny Raiford’s own soft smile.

“I just want something to be special,” she said.

Jenny came to her and hugged her. Emily felt the sparrowlike ribs and the sharp shoulder blades. Unlike the other female Carters, her aunt was not round and small and vivid. She was tall, as tall as Walter Parmenter and taller than the boys, except for Buddy. Emily knew this because there was a yellowing photograph of her and her father and her aunt and all the boys in the living room, taken when Buddy could still manage to stand erect for a short time.

She had the flaming Carter hair, though, except that on her narrow head it had dulled down to a tarnished copper and was threaded with gray. She had a thin, pure face that reminded Emily of a John Singer Sargent painting, dusted with faint freckles on her nose and cheekbones. Her neck was long and her hands and feet were thin and beautiful. Her eyes were the light-spilling hazel of Emily’s own—chatoyant, Buddy had called them once. Buddy had thought Aunt Jenny was beautiful. “Elegant,” he always said.

Her aunt had been stricken mute when Buddy died, just as Emily had been.

“You’re all the special this place needs,” she said.

Emily let her face burrow into Jenny’s clean-cotton-smelling shoulder before she stepped back.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “I’m the least special thing on this whole plantation.”

Her aunt held her shoulders and looked down at her.

“Whoever on earth told you that?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. Somebody did, though,” Emily said. And this was true. The words shivered deep in her stomach sometimes, or woke her sweating from sleep. Whoever had spoken them was lost to Emily, but the words themselves were as solid and real as earth or flesh.

“Well, somebody was full of horse hockey,” Jenny said, and gave her a smart slap on the fanny before she let her go. Emily laughed, unwillingly. The whole family laughed at Aunt Jenny’s attempts to swear. She always started out fine and ended up as archaic as a Victorian boy’s novel.

Cleta came through the swinging door from the kitchen, wreathed in great, fragrant clouds of steam. Her hands were floury up to her elbows.

“Ain’t y’all done in here yet?” she said. “Everything’s ready to go in the oven but them benné seed things Mist’ Parmenter wants. Jenny, you was going to make them, remember? And did you remember to bring any sherry with you?”

“I got the only thing they had at the Bi-Lo,” Jenny said. “I don’t think it’s what Walter had in mind, but you can’t get
1949
amontillado around here, I don’t think. Okay, I’ll start the benné seed biscuits, though why on earth he wants them, I don’t know…”

Emily knew. The night before she and the boys had sat long at the supper table, while Walter, his anger at Emily past, spun his gleaming visions out into the smoky air. He did this often, and they always listened as silently and intently as they had done last night. Emily did not know what went through the dark blond heads of her twin brothers during these grandiose monologues, but her own swam with exasperation and secret laughter and sheer boredom. Walter Parmenter’s suppertime rhapsodies rarely altered, either in content or in tempo. They were the only occasions that Emily ever saw him animated and grandiose. Most of the time he was close-faced and quiet, with the look of great distances in his eyes.

He talked of the not-too-far-off days when the aristocratic buyers of his Boykins would see in Walter a kind of rustic patrician kinsman, and would be visitors in his house as often as he visited theirs. They would be an entity apart, the river plantation aristocracy that still bloomed, whole and perfect, in his mind. His sons would ride and hunt with the sons of these men, and dance with their daughters at the great hunt balls, and follow their peers into the Citadel or, perhaps, Clemson. Emily would move gracefully into some small, select girls’ school, possibly Charlotte Hall, and would come out at the Christmas season with her beautiful young friends, and marry, eventually, a young man whose family name was to be seen on street signs and public buildings and the myriad, tasteful bronze plaques on the old doors along Broad Street. He himself would sit in clubs and drawing rooms with the fathers of these gilded young, and his knowledge of hunting and hunting dogs would hold them all in thrall. His Boykins would be prized in the entire sporting world.

“Sweetwater Boykins?” sportsmen would say from Grosse Point to Sea Island. “Best hunting dogs in the world. I got mine early, before every fool with a shotgun found out about them. You’d have to go some to get one now. Parmenter’s got a waiting list for pups a mile long. And if they’ve been started and broke at Sweetwater, you’ll never want another dog again in your life. Good man, too, Parmenter. Knows what’s important. And that place of his is the best natural hunting land I’ve ever seen. Deepwater docking, open marsh and wood marsh, deep woods, and open fields for quail.”

But last night’s fugue had been rococo even for him. In the candlelight he insisted on at supper, his sharp-planed face had glowed with more than sun, and his long, slanted blue eyes shone like mica. The hectic flush was not from liquor, Emily knew; her father allowed himself one small glass of single-malt scotch each evening before dinner. He never drank less or more. It seemed to be a part of the ritual of their evening meal, like the absurd candles teetering on the scarred wooden table, and the clean shirt he insisted on for himself and the twins. Even the glass he drank from was the same each evening: a heavy, cut-crystal tumbler, the only one remaining of a set that included a large, ornate decanter. He had told them at one early supper that the glass had come from England with the first of the Carters, though no one seemed to know precisely when that was.

“Baccarat,” he had said when he told them about the tumbler and decanter. “Best crystal in the world. Only thing worthy of a fine single malt.”

Walter used the word “fine” a lot. It was a ritual, too. Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.

His euphoria last night had, for once, a tangible thread in it. He and the boys had a guest on the Thanksgiving hunt, a neighboring planter with homes in Idaho and Long Island and even Hungary, where, her father said, the hunting was the best in the world.

Townsend Chappelle had both inherited money and made it, managing the network of supermarket newspapers about this Hollywood star’s anorexia and that one’s secret marriage at thirteen to a male exotic dancer at Chippendale’s. It had been the family business for decades. By now he had an unimaginable amount of money. Hunting was his life, and he had made Spartina, his great plantation on Wadmalaw Sound, into a sportsman’s paradise. Friends came from all over the world to hunt there, among them celebrities of every persuasion, whose post-hunt antics made the rounds of Charleston, usually in whispers. An invitation to hunt at Spartina was tantamount to one to hunt at Bernard Baruch’s fabled Hobcaw Barony in its halcyon days. The mere name Spartina shrouded the guest in privilege and singularity.

And he was joining the Parmenters on Thanksgiving morning because he wanted to see a good Boykin in action and he had heard that Sweetwater had exceptional ones. His own prize Labradors were too large for the stubby little boats that slipped into duck blinds, and his own flushing spaniels were too small to sustain long runs in extreme heat or swims in icy water. He wanted to start his own kennel of perfect waterfowl spaniels. Friends had referred him to Walter.

“Who are you taking besides Elvis, Dad?” Walt Junior said.

“No others, this time. Elvis is the best we’re ever likely to have. I’m going to let him go after a quail or two, too, and if we’re lucky he can flush a deer for us.”

“Don’t you think that’s kind of risky?” Carter said. “Elvis has never actually hunted. Maybe you ought to have some backup.”

“Don’t need it. Dog can do anything you tell him to,” their father said. “He’s done everything but go in the water after a shot game bird; he’s a beautiful sight in the water with the dummies. Sails right in like a dolphin.”

“You going to take Emily?” Walt Junior said, looking sidewise at her out of his father’s narrow blue eyes. Emily did not raise her head or speak.

“Not this time. Might put ol’ Townsend off, to have a little girl underfoot petting the dog.”

Still, Emily said nothing. Did he truly not remember who had trained at least half of last year’s Boykins?

The silence spun out awkwardly. Walter jerked around to look at her, suddenly, as if remembering she was there.

“I’ll let her come down and put a bug in Elvis’s ear before we leave,” he said jovially. “That way he’ll have it on good authority what he’s supposed to do. By the time we get back Chappelle will order every pup we’ve got coming along for the next fifty years, and let us train them, too. The whole Lowcountry will follow on his heels, just like water when you pull the stopper out.”

He looked as if he might actually levitate into the murky air of the breakfast room. Emily excused herself and got up to go to bed. She thought her heart would burst with rage and a sneaking, childish sorrow.

“Wait a minute, Emily,” her father called after her. She stopped but did not turn.

“Tell Cleta and your aunt Jenny that I want somebody to make up some of those benné seed things they have at Charleston cocktail parties, and get a good bottle of sherry in here, and polish up the library and have a fire going in there about sunset. I expect Mr. Townsend Chappelle would be glad of a drink and a bite in front of the fire while we’re finishing our business up. It’s only hospitable to offer.”