“Why?” I asked.
“Because I think what happened to me in Europe killed Shyla. And I never told the whole story to anyone, Jack. No one has heard what happened to me because I thought anyone who heard it would never be able to sleep again or have any peace. You know what I learned, Jack? I learned that a story untold could be the one that kills you. I think Shyla might have died because of what I did not tell her, not what Ruth did. I thought silence was the proper resolution and strategy for what happened to me. I did not think my poisons and hatreds and shame would leak out and poison everything I loved.”
“Darkness,” I said. “That’s the word that comes to me when I hear your name.”
“Could I tell you what happened to me, Jack?” George Fox asked, his eyes now looking out toward the river and stars. “Would you listen? Not tonight. But sometime soon.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I need to hear it. Ruth’s story was bad enough.”
“There is a reason I would like to tell it to you,” he said. “We have never liked each other, Jack. That is the truest thing between us. No?”
“True,” I said.
“But you are raising Leah as a Jew. That surprised me.”
“I am fulfilling a promise to Shyla.”
“But Shyla is dead,” George said.
“She’s alive enough for me to keep that promise,” I said.
“Will you have a cognac?”
“Yes,” I said, sitting down, facing my old enemy.
“Will you come back and listen to me?” George started, then said a word that I had never heard him use. “Please.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I tried to observe how the low country worked on Leah’s imagination. Since she was new to the territory, I wondered if the lowlands would strike the same notes of authentic magic in her as it had in me. I doubted it had the power to refashion a girl who had grown up subject to the fabulous riot and confusion of Rome, but I had not reckoned with Waterford’s quiet stamina of insinuation, the muscular allure of spartina and azalea, storax and redbud. The town took you prisoner and never once considered amnesty or early parole. I witnessed the process as Waterford began to lay its delicate fingerprints on Leah, and I hoped it would place its fingers on her heart and not her throat.
But it was the Isle of Orion that was fixing Leah’s destiny.
I used the lagoon in back of our rented house as playground and textbook. When the weather got hot, we crabbed for our dinner with fish heads and chicken necks. I taught Leah that the flesh of the Atlantic blue crab was one of the most extraordinary delicacies in the kingdom of food, and that it was better even than the taste of Maine lobsters. Together, we caught a tubful of crabs and cleaned them on a picnic table in the backyard, the white meat glistening and fragrant with sea water. I taught her to make sea crab soup with fish stock that we spent days reducing. I believe in great, not good, stocks. When we tired of soup, I taught her to make crab cakes using only lumpfin crabmeat bound together with flour and egg whites, then flavored with Chablis, capers, scallions, and cayenne. I did not desecrate my crab cakes with bread crumbs or broken-up crackers. The taste of crab was what I loved. As a cook, I passed all my prejudices on to Leah, and as a rapt student she accepted these opinions and made them her own. Every night we cooked together, creating a bank of memories we would treasure all our lives.
I also taught Leah to roast the perfect chicken, fry things the Southern way and the Italian way, bake a loaf of bread, compose a salad, put on a barbecue, shuck an oyster in under five seconds, make the best chocolate chip cookies in that part of the world, cook fish in parchment with fresh garlic, ginger, white wine, and soy sauce, and make biscuits that were better than Lucy’s. When I was in a kitchen I could no longer feel the pressure of the world on my shoulders; for me cooking has always been a high form of play, and teaching someone how to make a meal memorable was a combination of thrill and gift that I never tired of giving.
On some low tides, I would take Leah to the small creeks at the back of the island and teach her to throw a cast net. I bought her a small net of her own and taught her to wrap the cord around her left wrist, to spread the net with her hands balanced between the weights, and to put the net between her teeth prior to the toss. I told her that the unfolding of a net is like the action of a woman’s hoop skirt during the course of a waltz. It was a slow but satisfying way to catch a shrimp dinner. It was a fast way to trap bait.
I showed Leah that there was no inch of land or water without carnage or ambush: everything that lived in the tides was a hunter of some kind. The smallest minnow loomed like a barracuda in the world view of midges and the larvae of blue crabs and mussels.
When we had filled up our buckets with bait, we baited the hooks of our casting rods and fished for spottail bass, flounder, and sheepshead in the incoming tide.
“There’s no animal you can’t eat,” I said one morning as Leah pulled a spottail bass on to the shore. “You can eat this fish raw if you need to.”
“I don’t need to,” she said. “I’ll never need to.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll be like you when I grow up,” she said. “I’ll have credit cards.”
I laughed.
“Listen to me. I’m very serious. You can eat insects, turtle eggs. You could eat a loggerhead turtle if you had to. Frogs, raccoons, possums. The world of protein’s a large and varied one.”
“It makes me want to throw up,” she said.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” I said.
I thought about this for a moment before I went on. “Something terrible happens in everybody’s life. Something out of the ordinary. I’m trying to raise you to be light on your feet. To be on your toes at all times, ready for the unexpected. You won’t be able to prepare for it. It’ll always take you by surprise. Like my mother: she finally divorces my drunken, worthless father, marries a nice man, then gets rabbit-punched from behind with leukemia. It comes at night, when you’re sleeping, when your guard is down.”
“You shouldn’t call your father worthless,” Leah admonished. “It’s not nice.”
“You’re the first kid I ever met who could make me feel immature,” I said.
“You’re mean to your daddy,” she said, not looking at me. “All of you are.”
“He’s also drunk all the time.”
“Maybe that’s what happens to lonely people.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He visits me at school during lunchtime,” Leah said. “He’s always nice to me and he’s never drunk. He’s very sweet, Daddy, and I know he wishes you liked him better.”
“I wish I liked him better too.”
Leah said, “It’s your job to like him. He’s your daddy.”
“You’re awfully bossy for someone in elementary school.”
“You taught me to be nice to everyone,” she answered.
“Let me amend that slightly,” I said. “Be nice to everyone except my father.”
Leah shook her head sadly. “You’re a bad son. All my uncles are. Except John Hardin. He loves everybody.”
“John Hardin doesn’t count,” I said.
“You don’t understand John Hardin,” she said. “Just like you don’t understand your daddy.”
“You’re getting awfully big for your britches.”
“Why? I’m glad I’m grown-up. Don’t you like it?” she asked.
“Not at all. If the truth be known, I’d like to keep you exactly at this age for the rest of your life. I adore you at this exact time of your life. I like being around you ten times as much as I like being around any other person on earth. Though it might seem strange to you, I like you better than anyone else I’ve met on the planet earth. But like’s not strong enough a word. How about ‘adore,’ ‘worship,’ ‘plumb nuts about,’ ‘insane over’ … nothing quite cuts it.”
One should never underestimate the power of good teaching, bu
t even bad teaching can have a strong effect. Delia Seignious taught South Carolina history for over forty years to the ninth-graders of Waterford and squelched any passion for history that was budding in the imaginations of her students. There was no area of the subject that she could not render paralyzingly dull. The text was as dry as a logarithm chart and her high-pitched, one-toned voice could induce stupor in the most hardened insomniac. It was one of the town’s rites of passage to fall asleep in Mrs. Seignious’ history class. Her week-long lecture on the siege of Charleston was so tedious that some students left her class never realizing the siege had ended.
Mrs. Seignious almost grew faint with delight on the first full day of classes in 1962 when she announced to her class that two descendants of some of the most distinguished names in South Carolina history were on her roll of students. She had Capers Middleton and Jordan Elliott stand up to be admired for the good taste they had displayed by being born into such notable families. Capers stood up tall and proud. His face had a chiseled beauty even in ninth grade. But Jordan arose scowling and disoriented in those new surroundings with the other kids regarding him with suspicion as a transfer student with strange ties to royalty.
On the following day, Jordan was tossed from class when he was caught placing wads of Juicy Fruit, to which Delia Seignious was famously “allergic,” behind the map of colonial South Carolina. Mrs. Seignious explained to the class that Jordan was high-spirited and mischievous, but he was only following the immutable laws of genetics, since even a fool would know (Mrs. Seignious said this breathlessly) that it took a great deal of high spirits to break away from Mother England. And both Capers and Jordan were related to three South Carolinians who signed the Declaration of Independence. She herself, she added with becoming modesty, was related only to one signer of the Declaration.
“Both Mr. Middleton and Mr. Elliott come from fine, old, distinguished South Carolina families. One might ask what difference it could possibly make, but experience teaches it makes all the difference in the world. You can tell by the line of the jaw of both these young men that they descend from men and women who placed righteousness above mere glitter, justice above mere retribution, and elegance above the showy or the meretricious. You know what you’re getting when you do business with a Middleton or an Elliott. Their character is set. Their breeding impeccable. Have sons, Capers. Have sons, Jordan. You must not allow these splendid South Carolina names to die out and be relegated into the boneyards of history. We will be studying the writings and exploits of your distinguished ancestors this year and both of you will walk taller when you apprehend the value of the fine stock from which you issue. Every daughter you have will be a great name lost and cause for sorrow. Every son will be a name-carrier.”
Mike made gagging sounds behind Jordan and whispered, “Hey, name-carrier. Can I borrow some Juicy Fruit after I puke?”
Jordan passed him a stick of Juicy Fruit, then shot Mike the finger. Mike said after class, “One can tell from the line of my dick that I’m descended from one of the most distinguished bagel makers on the Upper West Side.”
“Have sons, Mike. Have sons,” I cried out happily.
“I’d rather watch a jockstrap mildew than listen to that woman’s voice,” Jordan said. But Mrs. Seignious had found her champion in Capers and he defended both her pedagogy and the content of her course to all comers.
“It’s important to know where you’ve come from,” Capers said.
“Why?” I asked. “What possible difference could it make? America’s a democracy. Everyone gets a fair shake.”
“Nonsense,” Jordan said. “Half this town’s black. Tell me the color of your skin doesn’t make a difference in this stupid part of the country.”
“Their time will come,” Capers predicted. “They haven’t earned it yet.”
“You sound like such an idiot, Capers,” Jordan said. “You’re talking like you’re a hundred years old and you’re only in ninth grade. You believe everything your parents believe.”
“I have more respect for my parents than any two people on earth,” Capers said. “I owe everything to them.”
“You’re the unhippest, uncoolest kid I’ve ever met, man,” Jordan said, appraising his cousin with a clear, unstinting California eye. “You’re lucky you were born so deep in the sticks. Your show would close in a week out on the West Coast.”
“You’re calling me a square, aren’t you?” Capers demanded.
“It’s far worse than that,” said Jordan. “You’re square root, man. You’re the kind of guy that likes to wear socks at the beach.”
“Maybe I’m just proud of who I am.”
“Maybe you’re just a Southern asshole,” Jordan shot back.
“Have sons, Capers. Have sons, Jordan,” I said, trying to cut the tension between them.
Mike said, “This course’ll help me when I write my memoirs, Jewboy in the Confederacy. Do you think Mrs. Seignious ever heard of Ellis Island? It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump down from Plymouth Rock.”
“South Carolina history,” Jordan said, shaking his head. “What a contradiction in terms. I’ve lived all over the world and I’ve never heard one person ever mention this state’s name. It’s nowhere, man. A loser state if there ever was one. Nothing’s ever happened here.”
“The state of South Carolina seceded from the Union first,” Capers bristled. “We fired on Fort Sumter and were the first to answer the call to arms.”
“Then the North came down and kicked your Confederate asses from Richmond to Vicksburg.”
“We gave as good as we got. Our generalship was superb,” said Capers, moving toward a relaxed Jordan with clenched fists.
“One never reads about Lee’s March on New York, but one does come across Sherman’s March to the Sea. I’ve studied Civil War battlefields with my father, Capers. I know a lot more about this subject than you do.”
“You’re not a true Southerner,” Capers announced.
“I’m an American, pal, and proud of it.”
“Your family arrived in the New World in seventeen-ought-nine. Mine came here in seventeen-ought-six. What went wrong with you?” Capers asked.
“When did your family get here, Jack?” Mike asked facetiously.
“Nineteen-ought-eight. Something like that,” I said, laughing, and Capers thought the laughter was directed at him. “How about your family, Mike?”
“Very early, my family,” Mike said. “They arrived on these virgin shores the same year the Edsel was introduced in Detroit.”
“Have sons. Have sons,” Mike and I sang together, laughing in each other’s arms.
For another class, Delia Seignious read a chapter from William Elliott’s 1859 book, Carolina Sports by Land and Water. Her reading voice was as monotonous as the sound of a running toilet. Half the class was asleep and the other half daydreaming while Delia labored to bring life to the serviceable prose of Jordan’s great-grandfather and Capers’ great-great-uncle on his mother’s side. Delia read the first chapter, the showcase feature of the book that had once dazzled Yankee fishermen, in which the Honorable Mr. Elliott describes the pursuit of the great manta ray, or devilfish, through the waters of Waterford Sound. Only Delia Seignious, with her genius for monotony, could have rendered the hunt for the two-ton manta ray with its great black-backed wings and bat-shaped body to a colorless tale whose words settled over her class like a sleeping powder. She could make the “Charge of the Light Brigade” sound like the directions for folding a napkin in a debutante’s handbook. When Mr. Elliott placed a harpoon near the spine of a devilfish and the enormous creature towed his slave-powered boat through the choppy waters off Hilton Head, the soft snoring of cheerleaders and football players intermingled and I felt the sweat soak through the back of my shirt. Great heat and mediocre teaching have done much to lower the collective IQ of the South over the centuries.
But one of her students listened to her with breathless attention and drank in every word she uttered. F
or Capers Middleton, what Delia Seignious offered up from the dusty granary of her knowledge played a central part in his image of himself and his world. He not only felt a close personal connection to South Carolina history, he thought of his own life as an enhancement and extension of it. From the day of his birth, he had enjoyed a highly developed sense of entitlement and privilege that had accrued to him through the accomplishments of his ancestors.
That Christmas, Capers received from his parents a first-edition copy of Carolina Sports by Land and Water. The book thrilled Capers with its spirited accounts of fishing and hunting expeditions that had taken place in a less-populated, pre–Civil War low country. The land Elliott described was a green paradise teeming with game and fish. Capers made a spiritual connection with William Elliott and hunted the same animals his ancestor had hunted and fished for the same fish at the exact same locations so lovingly described by this energetic forebear.
Capers’ father commissioned a black metalworker from Charleston, who was expert in the repair of wrought-iron fences, to fashion a harpoon for Capers exactly like the one wielded by William Elliott when he took to the channel and sounds in search of the great manta rays. Capers held this weapon and imagined the wild, dangerous rides that ensued after one of the enormous beasts was harpooned and turned in agony toward the high seas. He called upon the spirits of his ancestors when he tracked bobcat or white-tailed deer through the vast acreage of old rice plantations. He designed a secret task for himself: he wanted to kill every fish and animal that William Elliott had named in his book.
In 1964, Jordan’s father, now a full colonel, would be sent to a top-secret assignment overseas in a country called Vietnam. At that time none of us had ever heard of Vietnam.
Celestine Elliott took a home on the Point three blocks away from my house and a block away from both Capers and Mike. That summer we were inseparable. It was also the summer that Mike, Jordan, and I wished we had paid more attention in Delia Seignious’ South Carolina history course.
In April, on every Sunday, Capers had been borrowing his father’s eighteen-foot Renken fishing boat and taking to the river for an all-day fishing trip. All of us were competitive fishermen who took great pride in our gear and tackle; we changed baits and lures frequently as conditions changed and teased each other relentlessly as we went from oyster bank to deep drop in our pursuit of game fish. We baited our hooks with iced-down eels, then cast them in front of the great swishing forms of cobia hunting along the surface. The cobia were torpedo-shaped and powerful and they were my favorite fish to cook and eat at a campfire.