Charleston Read online

  Eliza traced the trunk of a cypress tree with her finger.

  “Come on, I’ll make you breakfast.” Henry led the way down a narrow hall to the kitchen. He pulled a package of coffee from a cupboard and set it on the counter, then opened the refrigerator. “Eggs, bacon, toast?”

  “Anything would be great.” Eliza looked over his shoulder. “Do you always keep so much food down here?”

  “I was here earlier this week.”

  She sat at the table and watched Henry measure the coffee and crack the eggs.

  “Would you mind if I had a look around?” she asked.

  “Yeah do. Everything’s the same. Nothing has changed.”

  Eliza walked to the front of the hall that overlooked the river. To the right was the large living room with a massive fireplace. She wandered through the living room and looked at the pictures set in silver frames on a table next to the sofa. Mostly photos of Mr. Heyward and his friends, dressed in camouflage pants and jackets for duck hunting, one of Mr. and Mrs. Heyward on horseback, two of large house parties. Eliza peered closer at the photos to see if she recognized any of the couples. Only one or two faces were vaguely familiar. She wandered through the French doors to the cypress-paneled library and was looking at a map of South Carolina dated 1731 when she heard Henry call her name.

  “I thought I’d lost you for a moment. Hope you’re hungry.” She followed him back to the kitchen, where he presented her with scrambled eggs and bacon.

  “Looks great, but it’s way too much. Give me about half. I never eat breakfast.”

  “Okay, but it’s more like lunch now.”

  They sat at a small kitchen table next to a window. “I was looking for that photograph of you and Cleve. I remember it being in the library,” Eliza said.

  “The one with the fish? It’s in my room. I’ll show it to you after we finish.”

  “That’s okay. I just wondered where it was.”

  Henry laughed. “Eliza, you don’t have to be afraid of me. You can go up by yourself. No ulterior motives.”

  “You must miss Cleve.”

  “I do,” he said. “You know, I can’t sit at this table without thinking of him. We spent so many summers here together. I think my parents first left me here for the summer when I was eight, but I’d been following him around since I was five. I had no desire to go with them to Maine. Cleve’s job was to stay two feet behind me at all times. But it was the other way around. I was always one step behind him. He used to call me his shadow. Whenever he sensed I was sad or homesick for my mother, he’d say, ‘Gracious Lawd, where’d dat no good shadow of mine gone.’ And I would try to stay completely behind him so he couldn’t see me when he turned. You know, I truly believed he didn’t know where I was.

  “Coffee.” Henry snapped his fingers and jumped up to pour coffee in two mugs. He handed one to Eliza. “Now that I think about it, my parents must have really trusted Cleve. I certainly wouldn’t leave Lawton down here with anybody. The only thing Cleve liked doing was fishing. I took you to visit him once. Remember?”

  “I do. He lived in a small whitewashed house with his wife off of Jacksonboro Road. He had painted the door and all the window frames blue to keep the bad spirits out.”

  “Exactly. I even helped him one summer give everything a fresh coat of paint. Cleve was deeply superstitious.”

  “If I remember, he was quite tall and his wife was minute, she had an unusual name.”

  “Queen Esther, but everyone called her Daughter.”

  “And she had just fixed a large pot of collard greens and red rice, and she filled a lovely glazed bowl for us to take down to Oakhurst. I don’t think we left one grain of rice.”

  “It’s right there.” Henry lifted his chin toward a sideboard where the olive glazed bowl sat.

  “Oh my God, that’s it.” Eliza stood up to look at it. “It’s lovely.” She turned it around and then upside down to look for markings but found none. “You know, I think it’s quite good.”

  “Cleve always said it was made by a slave potter. I tried to return it to him, but he told me to keep it, that it would bring me good luck. That was right before Cleve died.”

  “If I close my eyes and rub the rim, will my wishes come true?”

  “Don’t know,” Henry smiled. “It’s worth a shot. I’d always wanted to take you to his church to hear one of his sermons—the sermons of the Reverend Cleveland Washington of The Holiness Church of Deliverance in Ravenel, South Carolina. I don’t think he ever missed a Sunday. He even preached the Sunday before he died. I swear he could recite ninety percent of the Bible.”

  Eliza wondered if Henry’s bringing up a part of his life that had nothing to do with her was his way of trying to make her feel comfortable. Had he sensed how unnerved she had felt coming back to this house? Though she had sometimes dreamed about running into him, she had never allowed herself to imagine that they would get back together—and now here she was—with him—in his house.

  Henry continued, “You know, I’d forgotten a lot of Cleve’s lessons, but when I started bringing Lawton down here, it all started coming back. Cleve used to make me promise that whatever I did, I’d always ‘jump for de sun.’ I remember not knowing what he meant but promising anyway.” Henry shook his head. “More coffee?”

  “No, thanks, this is perfect.”

  “I think I learned everything I know about right and wrong either sitting in a boat or standing on a riverbank with Cleve. Monday through Saturday were devoted to fishing, and Sundays were saved for preaching. His favorite way of fishing was to tie lines on branches and in the morning come back to see if they were shaking. I can still hear his delight when he came across a shaking branch. Cleve had some little song he sang about frying up the catfish for his breakfast. Now that I think about it, it seems awfully cruel.” Henry leaned back in his chair and played a beat on the table with closed fingers. “So you really were worried we were lost out there.”

  “Well, maybe, for a moment.”

  “Come on, Eliza, I know you.”

  She laughed. “Okay, yes, I was. It’s just that you’re the only person I know who would go into the deep swamp of an uninhabited island with a small scrap of paper as a map.”

  “It wasn’t a map, it was a ‘to do’ list.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s the worst that could have happened? We would have walked around those old rice fields for a couple more hours. And then eventually, I would have figured out where we were, and it would have been the second time in less than twenty-four hours that I had acted as your savior, and you would be even more indebted to me than you already are. And besides”—he reached across the table for her plate—“you’ll never be in danger of being lost with me—at least not out here.” Eliza knew he was right. She had felt that when they were heading toward Jehossee Island. But that wasn’t the danger that concerned her. She was fearful of being in a world from which she could no longer retreat. Was that the danger Henry had been referring to earlier?

  “I’ve got it,” he said when she tried to help. “By the way, I have to go to Savannah tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting that shouldn’t last too long. Why don’t you come. We could have a look around and then have dinner. There’s a new restaurant down there that serves only locally grown organic—”

  “Thanks, but I have to make some headway on work. I came here to finish some things, to avoid all the diversions of London.”

  He nodded. “Okay, but you are missing an opportunity for collard greens and red rice that rival Daughter’s—just want you to be fully aware of the consequences of your decision. Oh, and that photograph of Cleve”—Henry pushed a plate forward in the air—“have a look upstairs.”

  “Up the stairs, turn left—last bedroom on the right?”

  “That’s it,” he said, without looking up from placing a plate in the dishwasher.

  THE UPSTAIRS WAS QUIET. ELIZA FELT AS IF NO ONE HAD walked down the hall for a very long time. She followed
the collection of prints from Indian Tribes of North America that lined the walls. She knew she was daring herself to return to Henry’s bedroom. The last time she had been in this room was ten years ago—the night before she left for New York to attend summer classes at the Art Students League. It was the summer after her freshman year of college. She and Henry had left a house party at Bulow Plantation and driven to Oakhurst to be alone.

  She pushed the door open. It was just as she remembered—a large mahogany four-poster bed dressed in a navy and green tartan, an English writing table positioned in front of the large window that looked out over the rice fields to the river. On the writing desk, Eliza recognized the photograph she was looking for—an eight-by-ten of Henry holding up a string of a dozen or more fish, a tall thin black man standing by his side. Henry’s two front teeth were missing. Next to the photograph was another in a small silver frame that startled her. It was a photograph of her sitting on the side of a boat. Her hair was tied in a bandanna, and she wore a white embroidered peasant blouse that fit loosely across her shoulders. She was laughing. Eliza remembered when the photograph had been taken. It was the day she and Henry had sailed with Weezie Vanderhorst and her older brother, Billy, out to the Morris Island Lighthouse.

  Before she headed back downstairs, Eliza looked around, as if she had left something behind. As she started to walk down the stairs, she heard Henry coming up three at a time.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said and stopped where he was. “Did you find it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And did you see the photograph of you?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you remember that day? When we sailed to Morris Island?”

  “I do, we sailed from the Yacht Club.”

  “It was rough, and we sailed fast. It took us all day.”

  “And we anchored close to the lighthouse and swam ashore. You and Billy climbed all the way to the top. Weezie and I were too scared.”

  “I was going through a closet a couple of years ago, looking for some keys I thought I’d lost, and I started checking every pocket of every jacket. In an old windbreaker at the back of my closet, I found a roll of film. I didn’t know what it was or where it was from, but I developed it, and there was that beautiful photograph of you and a lot of the Morris Island Lighthouse and a really nice one of Weezie and Billy clowning around together. That film must have been sitting in my pocket for almost a decade. I keep meaning to give Mrs. Vanderhorst that photograph. Here, I’ll get it.” Henry sprinted up the remaining stairs, three at a time. Eliza turned and followed him. Henry opened the top drawer of his desk. “It’s here somewhere.” He bent over and looked at the back of the drawer. “Aha.” He pulled out a packet and held it up. “Come look.”

  They sat together on the edge of the bed. Henry did not take his eyes off the photos as he flipped through them. “Here it is,” he said and handed her the image. Billy was standing behind the wheel of the sailboat, holding up two fingers in the shape of a V, and Weezie had her arms and legs flung out, as if she were in the middle of a cartwheel.

  Eliza looked at the photograph for a long time and then handed it back to Henry. She, Weezie, and Billy had done so many things together. As five- and six-year-olds they had chased pigeons in Hampton Park, as nine- and ten-year-olds they had pricked their thumbs with safety pins and sworn allegiance as blood brothers, and a few years later, they had tied strings with weights and chicken necks procured from Mr. Burbage’s grocery store on the corner of Broad and Savage and had gone crabbing off the Battery. And for the next several years they had dragged discarded Christmas trees back to the Vanderhorst garden to build Christmas tree forts. “This was a few weeks before the accident. I need to see Mrs. Vanderhorst. I feel horrible I never came back to see her. Right after the funeral I used to drop by every week, and we would talk a lot about Billy and Weezie, but then when I went off to college and my mother moved to Middleburg—and I never— I’ll go tomorrow.”

  “You could give her this. I keep meaning to do it.” Henry opened his desk drawer and found an envelope.

  “Does she still work at Century Antiques?”

  “Don’t know. My mother used to see her walking almost every evening, but she was just saying the other day that she hasn’t seen her for a while.” Henry put the photograph in the envelope and handed it back to Eliza. “Let’s go down to the dock. You can leave that here and get it before we go back into town. You don’t have to be home at any time, do you?”

  They walked down the front lawn of the main house toward the river. The heat of the midmorning sun had already begun to silence the day. They crossed the bank separating the two large ponds. Henry pointed to a small alligator submerged below the surface of the water. At first Eliza thought that Henry was pointing to a stick or a piece of a small log, but then she made out the eyes and snout poking above the surface of the water. The little alligator floated toward them.

  “Look at him. He thinks he has the whole pond to himself. Let’s see how bold he is.” Henry stood without moving as the little alligator swam within ten feet of the bank and stopped. When he took a large stride toward the edge of the pond, the alligator disappeared in a flash under the water.

  They crossed the bank and turned toward the dock. Eliza lagged behind and stopped to peer down at the long expanse of mud the dock crossed. Frightened by Henry’s passing shadow, the small fiddler crabs scurried to their holes. Eliza sat on her heels and watched them begin to peek back out, brandishing their oversized white claws as if it were possible to frighten the menacing giants who passed.

  Henry walked to the end of the dock and was examining a small stretch of railing. “What’s the matter?” she asked as she stood up and slipped off her shoes.

  “Just some rotten wood.” He looked up. “Be careful about splinters.”

  He pushed the section of railing back and forth to test it. “I need to replace these boards before they get too bad.” He opened the doors of a wooden cabinet that had been built along the railing in the covered area of the dock. “Do you want to lie in or out of the sun?”

  “In.”

  “You sure? Might be risky. You look like you’ve been in England a little too long for that.”

  “Sun would be great,” she called back.

  “Okay,” he said. “But the sun can be pretty brutal if you haven’t been in it.”

  The sun had already begun to warm the wooden floorboards of the dock. By midafternoon the boards would be too hot for bare feet.

  Henry pulled cushions from the cabinet and positioned two next to one another in the sun. He sat with his elbows resting on his knees. Eliza joined him and lay on her stomach and looked through the cracks in the boards down at the water below. The sun felt like tiny needles of heat on her calves, and it made her skin feel tight.

  Henry leaned forward. “Eliza, you did tear up your feet.”

  “I know.”

  “I would have thought in London you wore high heels all the time.”

  “I do, but I don’t walk across a city.”

  “Look, over there.” Henry pointed to a dark shape in a myrtle growing on the side of the riverbank. “An anhinga drying its wings.”

  Eliza raised her head to look at the dark bird that held its wings out as if hanging from a clothesline. “My father used to call them snakebirds.”

  “When they swim with only their neck above water, they do sort of look like snakes.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time out here,” she said and rested her cheek on her forearm.

  “Yeah, I guess I have.”

  Eliza filled her lungs with the warm, rich country air. “Sun, smell of pluff mud, sound of the tide going out. What more could anyone ask for?”

  “Well exactly, that’s what I was trying to say to you last night.”

  “Henry, I wasn’t being serious.”

  “I know, but I was.”

  Henry stretched out on his back with his knees bent and cushioned his head w
ith the back of his hands. “God, I could go for a nap,” he said and squinted up at the sky. He straightened one leg and then the other. He covered his eyes with his forearm and then turned his head to look at her. “So why Magritte?”

  “‘Why not?’ as my adviser would always say to me as a way of always getting a positive response.”

  Henry laughed. “Why not? Exactly, why not?” He turned to face the sun. “You’re going to regret having told me that. I am officially informing you that from now on—whenever you resist me on anything—that will be my new line of offense.”

  “We’ll see.” Eliza turned over on her back.

  They watched a plane scratch a long line across the sky.

  “Cleve used to tell me that the streams left by jets were souls disappearing into the sky on their way to heaven. He called them ‘runn’n’ clouds.’ He told me that whenever I saw blue spaces in running clouds, it meant the souls were on their way to Jesus. I was probably a little younger than Lawton when he told me that.” Henry looked at Eliza. “Did you ever think anything like that?” He continued without waiting for her to respond. “I believed every word. Now that I think about it, Cleve had me convinced that we could hear ‘dem souls.’ We would be fishing somewhere down the South Edisto, and he’d look up in the sky and say, ‘There goes another one,’ and I would ask him what he meant. ‘Dem da souls,’ he said, ‘who is faithfully departed.’ I don’t think—in fact, I’m sure Cleve had never been on a plane. I don’t think he’d ever been out of Charleston County—so those vapor trails—well, to him they were the souls making their way toward heaven. Cleve was full of colorful theories. I’m sure if my father had any idea of all the things Cleve filled my head with, he’d never have allowed me to stay with him all those summers.”

  Henry shook his head, as if he were trying to let go of something. “You know it’s strange, but when I was at my father’s funeral, I looked up at the sky, and I saw the trace of a jet and felt for a few minutes that Cleve was by my side. It was as if everything—all those years—had collapsed into one second.”