Free Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

not a big is-
    land, and there wasn’t then and isn’t now much access
    to it, but still, a whole island…Well, anyhow, Jimmy
    didn’t want it and he wasn’t about to turn it over to
    the government, so I guess I was as good as anybody.
    It liked to have driven my wife crazy. We had a nice
    little place in McClellanville and I did pretty good do-
    ing some general contracting over there, and I guess
    she thought I’d come on home and settle down when
    he died. After I got it, she wouldn’t spend another
    single night over here. This girl is the one who’s kept
    me company all these summers. Weren’t for her, it
    would be mighty lonesome.”
    Clay said nothing, and then he laughed softly.
    “What?” my grandfather said.
    “It’s a fabulous story,” Clay said. “It just goes to
    show you that a cat may still look at a king. It gives
    me great hope.”
    “Glad it does,” my grandfather said genially, and
    then, “Well, I’m going on to bed. You young people
    set awhile. I think there might be a few shooting stars
    tonight. Not like the big August hoohaw, but they’re
    something to see out over the marsh. I think there
    might be a bottle of that fancy white wine Miss Caro
    likes in the fridge, too.”
    It was then that I knew that he had planned all along
    for Clay Venable to stay over. I knew that Clay knew,
    too. I did not know whether to

    Low Country / 77
    sit still and pretend innocence, or simply get up and
    go to bed, taking my mortification along with me. I
    sat still.
    “If you’re embarrassed, don’t be,” Clay said finally,
    out of the darkness. “If he hadn’t asked me to stay I
    would have just stood there until he did. I wasn’t going
    home without getting to know what makes you tick.”
    Somehow that broke the back of my lingering re-
    serve. We sat in the soft darkness until very late, talking
    desultorily of things so ordinary that I cannot remem-
    ber now what they were, finally finishing the wine, still
    not going in. I had lit a couple of citronella flares, so
    that we heard the hum of the mosquitoes but they did
    not come in close, and in the flickering flare light I
    could see the planes of his narrow face, and the flash
    of his teeth as he talked. At some point in the evening,
    aided no doubt by the wine, it seemed simply and
    suddenly to me that I had known the geography of
    that face all my life, known always the music of the
    voice. When the stars began to fall we stopped talking.
    The last one had sunk into darkness and gone back
    to black, and we still had not spoken for some minutes,
    when we heard the scream. It rose out of the far dark-
    ness, high and infinitely terrible, rose and rose to a
    crescendo of grief and fury and something as wild and
    old and free as the earth, broke into a tremolo of des-
    pair and

    78 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    anguish, and then sobbed away. The very air throbbed
    with it long after it was gone. All the little sounds of
    the night had stopped. I sat stone still, my heart ham-
    mering in my throat, tears of fright and something else
    entirely welling up in my eyes. My fingers gripped the
    arms of my chair as if they alone might save me. Beside
    me Clay, in his chair, did not move either, did not
    breathe.
    “My God,” I whispered finally. “My God.”
    “Not an alligator, was it?” he said.
    “Oh, no. No. No alligator on earth ever sounded
    like that,” I said. I had begun to tremble.
    Then he said, “I know what it was. That was your
    grandfather’s panther. That’s what he’s been hearing.”
    “Lord Jesus,” I said, and it was a prayer. “Then it
    was true.”
    “Everything out here is, I think,” Clay said, and got
    up out of his chair and came over and put his hands
    on my shoulders, and kissed me.
    And that was that.

    3
    W hen I came downstairs, showered and more or
    less together, Clay was sitting at the round table on
    the back veranda making notes on the omnipresent
    clipboard that goes everywhere with him, and