Southern Exposure Read online

  Southern Exposure

  Linda Lightsey Rice

  In memory of Ruth Haigler Lightsey

  And especially for you, Bob

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

  —W. B. YEATS

  One

  We lived in a Low Country. Both before and after that summer, but it was never the same.

  Like all Southerners, we loved and hated to excess. As we grew tall under the South Carolina sun, the mortar of our psyche was chinked with unequal parts of both. Oftentimes we couldn’t tell the difference between them. Which is what we finally learned that last long night, in a darkness shattered by the obscene clarity of light.

  Later, when Stoney McFarland became temporary custodian of the paintings that survived, he likened them to the town. “Old paintings belong in old towns,” he said with a trace of sadness. “They’re faded and cracked and pockmarked with age. But they do endure; if we take care of these, they’ll last a long time.” Then he paused and added, “I guess only a terrible accident can really destroy a work of art.”

  We knew then, of course, that he wasn’t really talking about the paintings.

  Stoney McFarland was a prodigal son. One of several actually, for our town seemed to pull back its outcasts like a choke chain. But certainly Stoney was our favorite. He and his wife Anna, in their midthirties, had moved to Essex only two years before and had bought the old McCloskey place, a mammoth white frame house on Laurens Avenue, in the oldest part of town. It loomed behind a low wrought-iron fence with brick pillars, the left wing a massive two-story turret with banks of floor-to-ceiling shuttered casement windows; the adjoining wing was squared off into right angles, the roof pitched on the left and flat on the right. Fully half the structure was round but it affected cubism, fronted as it was on both levels by boxy balustraded balconies that completely encircled the building. It was obviously the life’s work of a schizophrenic vacillating between the Italianate and Queen Anne. With all the Victorian latticework and gingerbread brackets on the balconies, the house was almost too busy to be attractive. But it was compelling, commanded attention, constituted a deliberate affront to the modest bungalows it lived among. In a place where frugality and common sense were handed out with birth certificates, this house was an uncontrolled extravagance, as tawdry as a loose woman, maybe worse.

  Anna McFarland liked the house because it was unlike any other in Essex. It separated them. Stoney felt just the opposite: to him, this old house made them more a part of the town’s history.

  On an unusually warm April night, Stoney and Anna were sitting in their backyard. The rear of the McCloskey house concluded with a glassed-in back porch and a concrete pathway that led to a detached wooden garage, slightly leaning and so crammed with garden and sports equipment even a Japanese car wouldn’t fit inside. The garden tools had been inherited from the previous owner, and neither Stoney nor Anna knew what some of the implements were for. Their grass was neatly cut but, having been city dwellers most of their lives, they’d done little other landscaping. Even the jumbles of yellow jonquils along the sidewalk had been planted by the McCloskeys. The back of the lot, which was actually two lots deep, ended just short of a small natural pond about thirty by twenty feet. It was encircled by fifteen moss-draped live oak trees, stately old sentinels standing guard over the water.

  Stoney McFarland was stretched out in the grass on the bank of the pond, his shirttail loose, his toes freed from the white Nikes beside him, his back against a stump and his fingers laced behind his head. He looked as though he belonged exactly where he was. A large golden retriever named Silas lay at Stoney’s side, the dog’s sleeping head pillowed atop the white sneakers. In a second Stoney leaned forward and picked up a flat rock. “Stay,” he said. The dog opened a lazy eye and watched as the man pitched the rock across the pond. Stoney was a champion stone skimmer, a childhood pastime he had perfected on this very spot. But tonight his stone spiraled only a few feet before dropping unceremoniously out of sight.

  Anna McFarland reclined on a webbed lounge chair several feet away, her eyes closed. A portable Sony radio tuned to Savannah’s classical station sat on the ground beside her glass of wine. Stoney gazed beyond Anna to the treetops, then higher up to the full moon, hanging heavy and close. He looked back at Anna and wished she would open her eyes and come over and sit beside him. At one time they had always sat close so they could reach out and touch each other easily, quickly. In the early years they had never wanted to travel alone, or be apart overnight. That beginning, however, hadn’t saved them from this—this distance.

  He patted the dog’s rump, then got up and crossed to Anna and leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He slowly turned the radio volume down. She opened her eyes and he said, “How about some health food?”

  “What?” She stared up at the man who once swore he would take “real food” with him the next time he went to California.

  “The original health food.” Stoney grinned and picked up her glass of wine. He sipped the burgundy, then handed it to her.

  She smiled and finished the wine. Then, “It’s getting chilly, think I’ll go in.”

  “And leave me out here alone to get mugged or something?”

  Anna stood up. Her voice was light but not light enough to muffle its edge. “You couldn’t pay a mugger to live here.”

  Silence. She started toward the house. He hesitated for a second, hands in his pockets, uncertain whether to resume the conversation they’d had earlier that day. “Anna … if you’d just give the town a chance.”

  She stopped, her back still to him. “I have given it a chance. I told you how I feel, I’m not comfortable here. We don’t fit in.”

  “You don’t want to fit in,” he said quietly.

  She whirled around, eyes flashing. “If you mean I don’t want to spend my whole life sitting around throwing rocks in a pond in the middle of nowhere, you’re right. I sure as hell don’t.” The dark-haired woman looked down abruptly, remembering when it never mattered where they were or what they did as long as they did it together. She walked back toward Stoney. “I know you needed to come back here; at the time I was all for it. She reached out and touched his arm. “I love you, you know that. You’re the brightest man I know. But we can’t keep living in the past. We have to go forward—toward something.”

  Clutching her radio, an IV to the outside world, Anna made her way back to the house in its pool of stark white moonlight. Stoney watched her let herself in. He would happily sign his life away to the first years he and Anna were together. He picked up another stone and sailed it across the pond with a vengeance. It fell in the water with a defeated plop.

  Stoney McFarland loved the town of Essex, loved it for reasons that tentacled more deeply to his own childhood than to the fact that his father had grown up there. Descended from the impoverished genteel South, for whom education and culture remained acutely important long after they could afford either, Stoney had had the misfortune to come along a few decades after the Depression. At a time when jobs were scarce, they were scarcer still in a land where world war had decimated the agrarian tradition, and the Southern exodus of the thirties to the Northern cities had cost Stoney an Essex upbringing. By the late forties Stoney’s father settled in Washington, as a government clerk who eventually rose to a position of minor authority in the State Department. In the early days Stoney’s family lived in a gestating slum on the capital’s northwest side. What the boy remembered of that time was a pervasive uncertainty. Tall row houses with broken windows and reeking hallways and old drunks splayed across the stoops. And rules—rules about where he could go, which people on the block he could
talk to, the safest way to and from school. As the offspring of smalltowners who never fully adjusted to city life, the child inculcated his parents’ insecurities with precision. Every summer, however, he was shipped off to South Carolina, to a small town in the Low Country where his grandmother lived. There he was reincarnated in another world; the train that pulled out of Union Station moved between two astral planes. In Essex he could go anywhere he pleased. Alone. Old men patted him on the head and taught him how to fish instead of hissing at him to “Git out the way.” Everyone called him by name, not just the few people who lived nearby, everyone. People he saw at the filling station when his grandmother’s shiny red Plymouth needed gas and he got a Coke and stuffed peanuts in the narrow-necked bottle, reclining on the hood to watch old man Harris work the white ceramic pump. Everyone at the Lutheran church where he had to sit in the front pew so his grandmother could see him from the choir stall, everyone at the brick post office where she went to pick up her mail every day. And especially all the boys who met at the pond behind the McCloskey place.

  For nine months of every year he was pale and strained, but every summer he burst forth like a new plant. He shot up tall and straight; tanned, he looked out on the world in Essex and was pleased.

  By the time his father left government service for a private company and they moved to the Virginia suburbs, Stoney was in high school. His grandmother died and he rarely went to Essex after that. In the suburbs of the early sixties he learned that a guy was the clothes he wore, the car he drove, the girls he was seen with. These dictums seemed as oppressive to Stoney as the rules of his city childhood, and so he turned to sports, an arena less plagued by inconsistency and injustice. He excelled at baseball and found that athletics allowed him to satisfy the social requirements of his milieu without ever fully endorsing them.

  “You still go down to that hick place in South Carolina every July?” a buddy asked him when he was seventeen. “I hear they lynch niggers down there at the drop of a hat.”

  Stoney had never heard of anyone even being robbed in Essex, much less murdered. Black or white. No one in his family had ever been allowed to use the word “nigger.” But he kept his mouth shut, he did not try to exonerate the town. As race riots were written into the history of the decade, it became increasingly apparent that he would do well to keep his connection to South Carolina to himself. He read the newspaper religiously and tried to figure out which of the people who’d smiled at him when he was seven was likely to beat a man to death because his skin was dark. Harris at the gas station? The fat lady who ran the post office? (Only Harriet Setzler ever said mean things about black people.) Listening to the sudden authorities on Southern prejudice, Stoney never mentioned Essex to anyone for many years. Yet the town lurked beneath his consciousness like a dirty secret. He couldn’t cherish South Carolina as he once had, nor could he hate it as the times dictated he should. The uncertainty of his childhood in Washington—of what was true, who could be trusted—now permeated Essex too. Safe harbors did not exist. His best memories of his past lay buried in a place devoured by hate.

  The athlete in him finally elected to trust his instinct. He turned his back on the historical record: some parts of the South were different.

  For him, Essex was always a physical experience and in its senses he breathed in the elixir of childhood. It was the sticky sweetness of the honeysuckle vines that grew ten feet tall along the wire fence guarding the town cemetery. It was the gluelike coastal humidity, the verdant color and hypnotic redolence of flowers, the opulent sunshine whose superfluity burned into his shoulders and suspended time and gave him back a boy’s imagination. Everything about the Low Country threatened the sane and the sensible and for him invalidated adult ennui, from the gnarled live oak trees pressing heavily against the sky to the old black people mysteriously speaking Geechee along the shores of coastal islands. Wherever he walked, on the beach or in a swamp or along county blacktop, what this land gave to him, always, was texture.

  Perhaps his love for the Low Country was so intense because it had never truly belonged to him as a child. Much like Silas, who had epilepsy and thus would never be bred. Stoney had not grown up in Essex, nor would he grow old beside his retriever’s grandchildren. Both were temporal gifts, yet both somehow made him believe in infinity.

  If only Anna felt the same way.

  Before heading inside, Stoney looked back at the pond. The scene was just as he remembered from his youth—the water, the trees, the whispers of the night. Soft, peaceful, trustworthy. Then the moon floated behind a cloud and left the yard in sudden shadows. Stoney whistled for Silas and finally went inside.

  It all really began, it certainly ended, in the swamp. Leave the town sleeping in its complacency and venture down the swamp road, a deserted two-lane that leads toward the coast. Cool midnight air blankets the hot pavement, steamy squiggles rising from it like rows of stranded ghosts. Hidden here and there in the woods are gray tarpaper shacks, blue paint outlining their screenless windows. Above the road live oak branches interlock in a canopy. The trees part over murky inlets and hunter hawks fly low just as a water moccasin glides by beneath them. Everywhere the veil of humidity lacquers the night with a surreal varnish wherein shapes and forms transmigrate at will. What you see may be what you see—or it may not.

  Then the Low Country falls lower, becomes an altitudeless underbelly of earth and water. Its darkness feels like a prehistoric realm of ancient rites, of incantation and exorcism and transmutation. A snaky narrow river, which began in the open marshes of the coast, has slithered inland to form a dense swamp so choked with vegetation that the water barely moves. In the eerie stillness verrucose live oak trees rise from the watery underworld like primitive gargoyles. The tree trunks branch out only a few feet above the black water, crouching low beneath their shroud of Spanish moss. Unable to reach the sky, spidery old branches cleave inward, hang suspended in midair, crooked and twisted and useless.

  These are the live oaks of legend. Most are two or three hundred years old, rooted to ancient terra firma stained by the blood of honor and tainted by the smell of witchcraft. Oldtimers say that once this Southern tree grew straight and tall: unbent, it reached high into the sky. Legend has it that the live oak began to droop during the Civil War; as blood flowed freely around it, the tree shrank into itself. Shame stunted it forever. In Essex, children had always believed the live oak was haunted, that blacks who practiced voodoo or black magic had put a curse on it. Over time, touching a live oak in the swamps became a mandatory rite of passage for our young. Simply being in the swamps at night sometimes sufficed.

  Which is how, that same night, five people chanced to be where only one of them belonged. When the moon Stoney McFarland had seen in town escaped from behind its clouds, it illuminated a house some ten miles away, in the thickest darkest bayou. There a ramshackle wooden cottage perched beside a blackwater inlet. From the rotting eave of this house hung a model of a century-old sailing ship painted bright red. A few feet away a small fire burned and from its center protruded a stationary iron bar, slanted sideways as though it had fallen from the sky. This was the home of Maum Chrish, a black woman of almost six feet whose close-cropped gray head seemed to reach above the trees she lived among. Naked to the waist, her pendulous breasts flopped back and forth in the moonlight, slap-slap-slap in rhythm to the sluck-sluck-sluck of her bare feet as they repeated themselves in the mud. Between the bank of the river and her house were rows of newly turned earth, the black dirt streaked with the white sand of the Low Country. The woman reached inside a burlap bag slung over her shoulder in the style of her ancestors and scooped out tiny brown kernels. She dropped to her knees and tucked the seeds in the ground, leaning over, her long slim breasts grazing the mounds of dirt between the rows. Then she rose and moved farther down, row after row after row, her slapping breasts and feet piercing the nighttime still.

  No one knew where she had come from, no one knew exactly when she had first appeare
d in the swamps. The black people who lived near her and were said to consult her when someone was sick or had died might have known but they weren’t saying. Rarely did she come to town, but several people took her supplies from time to time, including an inordinate number of live chickens. Once in a while hunters would come upon gatherings at her shack, would bring back stories of wild singing and dancing. We didn’t ask questions, we didn’t particularly care. Not then.

  When Maum Chrish finished with the seeds she paused beside the black water, breathed in, “Djo-là-passée, djo-là-passée. The water to Ilé.” Turning, she picked up a Mason jar containing a thick white liquid and carefully poured the filmy material onto the seeds. Afterward she took a bamboo pole and began to fish Spanish moss out of the live oaks. The base of each tree was encircled by a brick pedestal lined with burning candles which spotlighted her dark face as she passed. She tossed the moss onto the rows of earth, then moved to the next tree. Again she removed the gauzy webbing and spread it across the planted seeds. She went from tree to tree until she had made a full circle around her house. Now a blanket of gray moss covered the disturbed dirt like flowers on a fresh grave.

  Maum Chrish sat on the ground and intoned a silent prayer to Cousin Zaca. She did not pray for her garden; she prayed instead for what she had seen in the white glare of the Dark Satellite in the sky.

  Some distance away, a boy and a girl of about the same stature—slim and tall and taut of skin and sinew—crept into the swamp. Hand in hand they walked among the great trees, moonlight lighting their way. In a moment they came to a small clearing surrounded by live oaks that shielded them from the rest of the tangled swamp.

  The teenagers paused in the clearing on a small grassy knoll protected from rain by intertwined branches. They seemed to know where they were. They embraced. Here the bayou smelled of rotted riverlife patined with the musk of camellia, magnolia, azalea. In the spring the flowers always erupt with hot color, the last remnants of the old rice plantations. Wild and unchecked, as everything is here, their scent is sweet and lush and dangerously sensual. It whispers to the stranger, promises pleasure. If he lingers, he will know what he has never known before. And so the boy and girl shed their clothes and knelt down together on the grass, their tongues and legs entwining.