Low Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

on boats.’ Oh, he knew, Ratty knew,
    didn’t he?”); the Waterbabies ; the Nancy Drew series;
    the Bobbsey Twins; the Lawrenceville Stories. For some
    reason they fascinated her. Black Beauty. Silver Birch.
    Midnight Moon . And alongside them, the handbooks
    and textbooks and charts and maps of the Carolina
    Lowcountry marshes and islands that we got for her
    from the Corps of Engineers and various coastal con-
    servation and natural resources organizations.
    On her desk, a small voodoo drum that Estelle’s
    Gullah grandmother, who adored Kylie, had given
    her; we never knew where it had come

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    from originally, but Estelle seemed to think it was the
    real thing. And the big osprey we had found newly
    dead on the bank of the tidal creek that cut through
    the undulating green marsh over on the island one
    summer day, still perfect except for the forever myster-
    ious fact of its death. Clay had taken it to a taxidermist
    for her, and the great bird, wings spread, had kept
    yellow-eyed watch over Kylie and her room ever since.
    Of all her things, I think she loved that bird the best.
    And that was all. Except for her neat, beigespread
    bed and the matching armchairs, nothing else of her
    showed. Her clothes were shut away in the closet; she
    almost never left anything lying out. Her outgrown
    toys were in a hamper in her closet. The room did not
    look lonely, though. The space and order spoke of
    Kylie as clearly as strewn possessions would have of
    another child.
    I walked over to the French doors that opened onto
    her balcony and leaned against them and looked back
    into the room. Something caught my eye, the edge of
    something blue, almost hidden under the dust ruffle
    of her bed. I leaned over and picked it up. A T-shirt,
    a small one, faded, that read PEACOCK ISLAND PLANT-
    ATION SUMMER RECREATION PROGRAM. You saw shirts
    like it all over the island; they were issued to children
    who joined the summer program, mostly the children
    of guests who wanted to enjoy the island’s adult pur-
    suits while their children went

    Low Country / 35
    about their own, supervised activities. I remembered
    that Kylie liked the shirts but hated the program and
    absolutely refused to join, even when her father pointed
    out that it would be a real treat for the visiting little
    boys and girls to meet the daughter of the owner of
    the Plantation.
    “Big deal,” Kylie said. “You think I want to go on a
    nature walk with some kid who’s gon’ yell his head
    off if we see a snake?”
    We did not make her attend the program. It would
    indeed have been ludicrous. Kylie was dealing calmly
    with bull alligators and rattlesnakes when the offspring
    of the Plantation visitors were shying at horseshoe
    crabs. She deigned to wear the T-shirts, though.
    “That way the kids will all think I go,” she said
    reasonably to Clay, and that was that.
    I held the shirt to my face and sniffed. It smelled
    fresh and particular, like summer and sun and salt and
    Kylie herself, not at all like dust. But it should have
    smelled of dust; it must have been there, just under the
    fringe of the dust ruffle, for a long time. A little over
    five years; Kylie had been dead that long. I had not
    been this far into her room since the day we closed it,
    not long after her funeral, after Estelle, tears running
    silently down her long brown face, had cleaned it for
    the last time and closed the door. Sometimes I opened
    her door and looked in, and I knew that Clay did, too,
    but I did not think that anyone came all the

    36 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    way into it. I would ask Estelle. She must have simply
    missed the little T-shirt the last day that she cleaned.
    I looked out at the ocean then. Kylie had died in
    sight of her room, in sight of our house, when her
    small Sunfish with the red sail had flipped in heavy
    surf after an August thunderstorm and the stout little
    boom had hit her a stunning blow to the temple, and
    she had gone down and