Osler's Razor

Chapter Six: Autumn

There is a rain that falls only in the South, a warming, comforting rain that washes over the skin and lingers. It has a distinctive sound, falling steadily and reassuringly on those who choose to enjoy it the way I learned to: in a field, lying flat between the rows. As my bus approached the city of Richmond and the others slept, it was the gentleness of this rain that comforted me.

As dawn broke over the city, we pulled into the stylized white terminal near the center of downtown, where a single tree sat in a ragged hole in the sidewalk. Like many Southern cities, the center of downtown Richmond is no longer really the center of anything. The entertainment district is ensconced in old warehouses, and the shopping nexus has shifted to malls outside of the city. Still, there remains a certain veneer to the center of such a city, provided by the gloss of history if nothing else. This gloss can be perceived as either a noble elegance or a lingering staleness, and in Richmond I felt both.

The bus to Columbia departed at nine, and I had two hours to kill. Stepping out of the bus, I felt the dew mixing with perspiration on my skin under my shirt, a feeling that made me think of fevers and afternoon naps in front of the fireplace. I had suffered through Gladys, who had gently leaned on me through the night, leaving me the dilemma of suffering muscle cramps or shoving her around once in a while in order to get more comfortable. I had chosen a sort of middle road, heaving my body slowly into a new position every few hours while being careful not to jolt her too much. She had left the bus in Fredericksburg, with a brief and incoherent good-bye. Her aroma lingered to Richmond.

I quickly discovered that not much is open early in the morning in downtown Richmond. I had walked several blocks before spotting a Krispy Kreme donut store which appeared to be open. A short line stretched back from the bare counter and a few large men sat at the counter on vinyl stools drinking coffee. The sign on the wall simply listed the prices for donuts, coffee, and juice, and under a small glass case near the cash register sat the donuts on little bits of wax paper: Creme filled, lemon filled, chocolate covered, and plain.

Advancing to the front of the line, I surveyed the offerings in the glass case, where the donuts were lined up in rows, like fallen dominoes. "Do you have any glazed ones?"

The woman looked at me with a look that conveyed both boredom and contempt, and gestured over her shoulder at a glass pane. Behind the pane was the doughnut factory, with conveyer belts, fryers, and tables. Glazed donuts were traveling in precise rows up the conveyer belts. Glazed donuts were emerging from the fryers on the ends of long mechanical poles, which dipped them into the glaze. The tables were laden with glazed doughnuts. "We have glazed doughnuts," the woman said flatly.

I walked out of the shop with my glazed Krispy Kremes and sat on the curb. Mentally, I tacked "and I was publicly humiliated by a doughnut clerk" to my tale of woe recounted the previous evening to Gladys of Trenton. The cars were thickening the road with traffic, and down the block I could see people my age filing into office buildings in suits, walking sharply down the concrete paths. I felt strikingly alien from them as I sat on the curb in jeans wolfing down my doughnut. Lisa would be one of them, walking purposefully down the sidewalk in her blue suit and white shirt.

A woman's voice, the sight of a white blouse, a stray thought that had penetrated my defenses; I could not keep her out.

As I arrived back at the station, the announcer drawled the boarding call for the Columbia bus, and I went to the gate and took my seat next to the window. At the next gate, a group of children gathered for a field trip. I felt as alienated from the children as I did from the office workers filing into the building. The child of the surgeons, the blond girl with the anger inside of her and the tears on her fists, still haunted me. Adding to my alienation was my realization that it was children who had killed Mark. Children of divorce, children with guns; when I saw children I saw those children. The bus backed up out of the dock, leaving the children gathered at the next gate screaming and pulling on one another.

* * *

The bus drove into the heart of the South through the day as I slept, crossing into North Carolina and finally South Carolina by late afternoon. Columbia was a blur as I changed buses once again, setting off for the New World of the Low Country still groggy from sleep and forgetting. The third bus of my trip seemed to transform as it left the city. The driver was a large, polite black man who insisted that each of the passengers sit before he set out for Charleston. His voice, while reflecting the tenor of the region, was comforting to me in that he seemed confident yet unhurried, a rare combination in both Chicago and New York, where confidence seems to stem from hurriedness. The interstate was the same as any other; it was simply the mood of the space which had altered. The bus tooled along in the right lane at a steady 55, a striking departure from the New York-Richmond bus, which had lurched from lane to lane as the driver cursed the cars he passed.

The sun went down slowly over wide, fallow farmland, sinking huge and orange into the horizon over the second growths and brown-orange earth. The harvest moon was the first thing I saw when I woke up, the red bleeding into the marshes by the side of the road. Pregnant.

The bus arrived in Charleston around ten in the evening, with the departure for Beaufort not until the next morning. I set out on foot to find a cheap place to spend the night. Despite the late hour, the downtown area of the old city was filled with people, many of them young. The buildings were unlike those in the cities I was familiar with. Here, the houses were turned sideways to the street so that the porches faced the driveway as opposed to the street. Cadets from the Citadel wandered about in groups of two or three in their uniforms, speaking politely but eying suggestively the small clumps of women their own age who were also meandering through the Battery.

I liked the air in Charleston that first night. It was clean and heavy and warm. Block after block, there were broad porches and the hum of air conditioners.

After several blocks I came upon the harbor, lined with fishermen casting their lines and nets into the murky waters below. No one seemed to be catching anything, but neither did they seem to be in a rush to catch anything, and they were taking long drags on cigarettes or slipping in and out of conversations between casts. The ambiance calmed me.

I sat on the seawall and watched one group for several minutes. They were all silent, looking out over the harbor as if there was an answer out there. At first I watched them; then I looked out to see what it was they were watching. In the harbor, there were only the lights of boats on the far side.

One of the fishermen, a tall man with a thinning beard, called out to me in a thick, mellow voice. "Hey, kid, give me a hand over here."

The call startled me, and at first I just looked at the man. He looked back at me, nodded, then motioned me over. I walked nearer to him and looked over the seawall. He had a large fish on the line and it was nearing the surface of the water. As I looked into the water, the man slapped his hand on the seawall impatiently. "The net, kid, get the net!"

Rushing past several of the other fisherman, I grabbed a green net on a long pole and rushed back to the man's side. I knew the routine-- watching the fish, I leaned over the water with the pole and tried to snare the fish. Twice I missed, smacking the fish on the side as it struggled to free itself from the hook. The third time, however, my swoop with the net was successful, and I hauled in the flopping monster over the stone wall.

Unhooking the fish and holding it by the gills in his callused hands, the man displayed it for the other fishermen, who called out approvingly. Having finished his display, the man quickly turned around and dropped the fish into the water, where it flipped its tail once before disappearing under the water.

"I always let 'em go, 'cause I can't stand the way they taste," the man said to me in a gentle South Carolina accent. "So I throw 'em back and go home and cook me a steak. You're Joey Hobbs' boy, aren't you? Haven't seen you in a long time."

I paused for a moment. "No, sir, I'm no relation to Joe Hobbs. I'm from Chicago."

The man looked at me suspiciously. "You sure look familiar. I know I seen you or your people around here. Give me some time; I'll figure it out." Sticking out his hand, he added, "I'm Garland Porter of Charleston, South Carolina. People remember my name if I tell them my address."

"I'm sure they do," I said, not quite sure, as I shook his large hand. He looked to be about my father's age or a little younger, with the paradoxical attributes of a workingman's hands and a sociology professor's beard and eyes. He watched me too knowingly to be the ignorant rustic he pretended to be.

"So you're from Chicago. What the hell are you doing wandering around down on the Battery by yourself? Go up to the market and meet some pretty girl and take her out to dinner! That's what you should be doing, not hanging around with the fish-heads. Where you staying?"

I leaned the net against the stone seawall and thrust my hands into my jeans pockets. "Actually, I was just looking for a place, sir. I'm on my way to Beaufort on the bus and it doesn't leave until tomorrow. I thought I might find a cheap hotel or a roominghouse around this area..."

Garland Porter let out a jovial, snorting laugh. "Ha! Cheap! Not in this part of Charleston. We done been overtaken by the Yankee tourists. Tell you what, son. You come home with me and stay with me and my wife. Maybe she can say where we know you from. That's what we'll do." His voice spoke of a conclusion, not a question, and I accepted it as that.

The cynic inside me said that this might not be such a great idea, having accepted a room in the home of complete strangers who could be cannibals or worse. Confederate cannibals, no less. Yet I inherently trusted the man, who had a compelling demeanor and a reassuring tone to his voice.

Garland Porter lead me to a side street, dark and narrow, with small lamps lighting the narrow houses. I at first thought that we were headed towards a truck or car, but if so, Mr. Porter had parked needlessly far away from the fishing area. I looked into the front rooms of some of the houses as we walked. In one, a man was cooking dinner, peering at a cookbook with one hand and waving a spatula with the other; in another, a family sat in leather couches watching a television, the mother leaning in the doorway eating a cookie. Watching these diversions, I listened to Garland Porter explain his theory of fishing, which involved looking for the "mood" of the weather, imagining one is a fish, and then wondering whether or not one has a "hankerin'" for some food. He seemed totally unconcerned with my background, my problems, my reason for being there.

At the corner, Garland Porter jumped onto a porch. The house was large, with thick columns supporting the upper porch and a swing hanging from the lower. As my host pushed open the door, I heard the sound of opera, Rigoletto, burgeoning from stereo speakers in the parlor off to the left. There sat the very small and very pale Mrs. Porter, who quickly jumped up as her husband and I crossed the threshold of the front door. Garland wasted no time in explaining my situation to his wife.

"Oh, you poor thing, you're homeless!" exclaimed Mrs. Porter, holding her hand up to my cheek. "And don't listen to this old man. You can call me Samantha, just like he does."

Looking around at my new surroundings, I turned to my hostess, who was dressed in a flannel nightgown. "Thank you, Ma'am. I have an Aunt who's named Samantha. Actually, she's from South Carolina, too. Down on the islands."

"Maybe that's it!" interrupted Garland, "maybe that's where I know you from. You ever come visit her?"

"No, sir. Actually, she's lived in Chicago for the last forty years at least. I've never been down here before, though I've heard a lot about it from her. None of my family is left down here, but my grandfather grew up down here, and I'm named after him, so maybe that's why I seem familiar."

Mrs. Porter seemed pensive. "So what's your name again?"

"My full name is David Baxten Trigg the second; my grandfather who came from down here was the first. My grandmother's name was Ruth Ellen Mays before she married, but she died in childbirth when my Uncle Ennis was born."

"That's it! Ruth Ellen Mays; my sister worked for her. I met her once, in Frogmore, South Carolina, about an hour South of here, and Garland did, too. He and I were high school sweethearts, and he drove me down to pick up my sister. You must just look like your Grandfather, and that's what's got us thinking we've seen you before." She paused, pleased with herself. "I don't know how much you know about your family down here, but they were real controversial all around. It was enough just being as...," she said, her voice trailing off.

Garland suddenly looked uncomfortable. "Well, now that it's all settled that you come from the Low Country and all, maybe we can fix you up a bed." He looked briefly at his wife, who quickly headed up the stairs. Garland motioned for me to take a seat at one of two red leather high-backed chairs placed on each side of a tiny stone fireplace.

"So you have family here, I gather. Good people?" With this, Garland cocked his head curiously, trying to read my reaction.

"I don't know them. My father's people. Yeah, I imagine they're good people."

"They from out the islands?"

I nodded.

"Lot of interesting people out the islands," Garland continued, still looking to me for an answer.

"What I've seen of South Carolina, Mr. Porter, has been very nice. I can't say that I'll have any bad news to report once I get back to Chicago." No harm in flattery, I guessed.

Garland leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Well, that's good, David, because the last thing we need is anymore bad press. I'm a bricks-and-mortar man, myself, building contractor. Same as my Daddy, and my Daddy's Daddy, whom I had the pleasure to know."

The phrase 'bricks and mortar' stood out to me, and I rummaged through my memories searching for its significance. Lisa's face came to me, and I remembered; the reference to bricks and mortar as part of the Passover Seder I had read about, but never invited to attend.

"The Low Country is a small town," Garland continued, his voice taking on a sharper timbre, "and like a small town, there is something odd about a guy you don't know. People just expect to know what everyone else is doing, know their parents, all that, whether you're rich or poor, black or white, whatever. It becomes everyone's business pretty quickly around here; you'll see. Now, I don't want to sound unfriendly, and it's fine with me if you keep your intentions to yourself, but it strikes me as a little odd that you are down here by yourself just nosing around. You don't know the people or the land down here, but let me assure you that they know you, and what you'll do and won't.

Again, the older man cocked his head in a quizzical look, waiting for a reaction. "Oh, I understand," I lied, my head swimming. The South was still an utter mystery to me. Garland seemed to be issuing a warning of some type, but I could not see what it was I was being warned off of. As on my trip to the school on the South Side, I felt I had entered an alien culture, one which shared few of the seminal beliefs of my own family, yet seemed to understand, even to own, the body and soul handed me by my father.

"Like I've been telling you," the older man continued, "the people down here stay in one place and like it. It's not New York-- here we still have a knowledge of what goes on, rather than the fear that it's all out of control and that all we have to do is sit on our own little corner of the earth and wait for the sun to hit us. You'll see, though, and you'll feel it, cause the South is in your blood. You'll know."

Samantha Porter returned down the stairs, smiling and waving for me to follow her. Garland rose, and I followed him. I was shown to a room with a steep slanted ceiling and a dormer window, with a single bed and a chest of drawers. As I bid the Porters good-night, Garland offered to drive me to the bus station at eight and wake me at seven. They smiled cordially as they left me sitting on the bed, reaching for my duffel bag.

At the foot of the bed was a portrait, in the style of the 19th century, of a very young man in a confederate uniform. The young man in the portrait looked at me through strangely familiar eyes; eyes that knew the imminence of death. My mother's eyes.

I did remember her eyes. I saw them looking at me, kindly, when I was about to do something bad, the type of thing that you wouldn't do if you thought about it for a few moments. Her eyes were the color of water in white porcelain, the lightest of blues. I longed to see them again, but I could never hold them before me through of force of will; they appeared and were gone, an apparition beyond my control.

I sat alone with my hand dangling into my bag. I wondered what it was about South Carolina that seemed so different, yet so familiar. It was like her eyes: A feeling that was strong but beyond my control or my comprehension, a mystery I savored.

I had marveled at the enormous statues of Lee, Davis, Stuart and Jackson which dominated the boulevard in Richmond's dawn, facing North. They were presented as heroes. I had learned about such figures both in high school and in college, but each time they were spoken of, it was in a discussion of the grand sweep of a tragedy which had been brutal and terrible.

I looked back at the small painting before me. The boy in the picture represented something more than the war for which he was outfitted, something indescribably more mysterious and comforting and threatening. Was it his bed that I lay in? Had he died in that war? I knew that there was a link between the room and the boy; his presence fit.

Garland woke me in the morning with a quick rap on the door followed by a cheery "hey ho! Time to wake up, boy!"

I turned and for the briefest instant had no idea where I was. New York? Lisa's? College? The picture of the boy brought me back, and I walked to the shower. The water flowing over me seemed particularly cleansing, only in part because I had not had the opportunity to wash for two days. I smiled at the fact that I was washing off the dirt of eight states, and almost tangibly could feel the soil of the City of New York leaving my skin.

Downstairs, Mrs. Porter had prepared a breakfast of juice, bacon, scrambled eggs, and toast, which sat on a plate awaiting me. There was slight mist on the streets outside, and near the window, two children walked to school with bookbags over their shoulders. I ate quickly, following the lead of my silent host, who seemed to be in a rush. Soon we were out the door, and I was rushing my thanks to Samantha for all that she had provided. Garland lead me around the back to a small pick-up truck, which seemed oddly out of place in the orderly urban neighborhood.

At the bus station, Garland pulled over and put his hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry, son, we didn't mean to scare you."

I was perplexed by this. "I wasn't scared, sir. I appreciate everything you've done."

The older man patted my shoulder gently. "This is sort of a homecoming for you, I guess, so welcome home, son."

I nodded to him, jumped out of the truck, and slammed the door behind me, waving as the truck pulled away and trying to memorize his words.

The bus left for Beaufort by heading inland on U.S. 17, through a thicket of commercial sprawl octopussing out from the core of the small city. I was one of only three people on the bus, and sat near the window as the morning sun streamed over the fields and inlets. Closing my eyes, I focused on the task before me. I realized that I knew very little about Dennis Smith other than his name, his crime, the fact that he had escaped from prison, and the location of his last phone call to Tenerife. Why had Tenerife been so confident that he had stayed in Beaufort, when it was just as likely that he had simply been passing through on the way to somewhere else? I had no physical description or photograph of the man, and knew that a name alone is not the best identifying factor for a recent prison escapee, who would be expected to use an alias. I would have to call Tenerife as soon as I arrived in Beaufort and seek more information if I was to find him. In the back of my mind however, I knew that I wasn't so much taking a trip with a goal in mind as I was surfing the crest of a wave, which would take me where it wanted.

* * *

Through the window, the landscape subtly changed. Broad and gentle rivers coursed through grasses, stretching out into the forests beyond. Large birds with long necks stood here and there in the swampy land next to the rivers, looking for fish. Aside from the occasional tiny white wooden store, there were no businesses near the highway. On an inlet, a boat headed out to the sea, slowly chugging through the meandering curves of the river's course. It seemed as purposeful as I was lost.

I slept again, keeping the ghosts at bay, and awoke as the driver announced our arrival at Beaufort. Looking outside, I saw only the usual strip-mall parking lots facing me, and my heart sank. I had hoped that the town would be picture-perfect, with a small main street and a cluster of elegant homes. Taking my bag over my shoulder, I walked down the highway until I reached some tennis courts, then veered off to my right on instinct. Walking under tall trees which had not begun to show color, I found the town that I had hoped for; houses with lawns, schools, and finally, a downtown which emerged from the homes as a small-town platonic ideal, with banks on one end of the main street and a hardware store on the other.

My challenge was to settle in, finding a place to stay for at least one night. The town seemed pleasant enough, and some of the patrons of the businesses even appeared to be tourists. Thrusting my hand into my pocket, I pulled out five quarters, not enough for a call to Chicago, and I had lost my cell phone somewhere in New York. I would have to borrow a phone from someone. I carried my bag over to a nearby pay phone, and rustled through my address book in search of Tenerife's card. As I stood with the small book in my hand, I became aware of a diminutive, gray-haired woman staring at me. She came closer, and I could see an intensity like that of Mr. Porter in her green eyes.

"You," she announced loudly, "are a Trigg."

Astonished, I looked at the old woman, who stared back at me with a face marked by smug satisfaction. She was elderly but not frail, and certainly assertive. She wore an elegant blue blazer, pearls, and black-rimmed glasses, giving her the appearance of a particularly well-heeled librarian. "So what brings you back here all of a sudden?" she said in a crisp, friendly voice. "I thought we were rid of the whole clan of you, after all."

I was stunned by this identification. Finally, reaching out my right hand I introduced myself. "Nice to meet you, Ma'am; I'm David Trigg."

"Well, of course you are. I knew your grandfather well, or maybe it was your Great-Grandfather. Your family,... well, there was a time when they were quite prominent down here, but I guess that you know that already. I would imagine that's why you are here again, along with the rest of them."

I was doing my best to catch up. "I... actually, I'm down here looking for someone, Dennis Smith. Do you know him?"

The woman cocked her head and took on a condescending look. "Well of course you're looking for a 'Dennis Smith'. I'll take you out there right now, if you'll trust my driving. A lot of people say that the older people shouldn't be allowed to drive, but that's a lot of bunk, absolute bunk." Taking my hand, she shook it firmly, continuing, "I'm Amanda Trayn Woods, which may or may not mean anything to you. Whether it does or not, follow me. Hurry up! I have a meeting in a half hour."

I nodded and followed mutely. She lead me across the street to an old Buick, and opened the passenger door for me. The bench seat was made of thick black vinyl, and the car was as neat and clean as she was.

"My friends drive Cadillacs, my children drive Mercedes, but I stick with this," she explained. I've had this old battle-wagon for twenty-three years, and all I do is change the oil. Give me a reason to change, and I will, but not until."

She then lapsed into silence, concentrating on her driving. She drove out of the small downtown, and took a right over a long bridge stretching over a river dotted with fishing and pleasure boats. The shore of the river was green with reeds and trees, and the island was similarly lush with vegetation. When the old woman had paraphrased my quest, her tone indicated that she was aware that she was being lied to in a polite manner, and that she understood and would help me. Apparently, she understood much more than I did.

She was a terrible driver, and we were lucky to avoid trucks traveling on the far side of the yellow line, which she crossed repeatedly. After driving down the main road for several miles, she abruptly turned right down a much smaller road between two swamps. The complexion of the land changed on this road, as the bustle of commerce faded and the quiet music of agriculture took over. Here and there we passed fields cut into the forest as we drove in silence. The road was as straight and flat as a Nebraska interstate.

I noticed that the farms were occupied by blacks, who could be seen walking by the road, working the land, or sitting in the shade of a porch as the heat of the early Fall day came upon the land. The farms were small but fully cultivated; the crops came up almost to the very doors of the cabins and homes which sat back off of the road on the edge of the woods.

As the car sped along the arrow-straight road, I tried to draw out my suddenly taciturn guide. "This is pretty country," I commented.

"Why people leave is beyond me, to tell you the truth," the old woman responded, somewhat bitterly, "they ought to know that you never get the pluff mud out between your toes. We wouldn't be having all these problems if people didn't all want to come down here, and if we just had it like it was, but we have to face the facts that those days are over. You tell that to your family. You go tell the Chicago people."

"With all due respect, Ma'am, I get the idea that there are a lot of things which I don't know about my own family or about what's going on down here."

"If any of us knew our own families," she intoned, "maybe we wouldn't have all the problems we do." She then lapsed into the silence of concentration which I had briefly roused her from. The Buick continued down the same straight road, neither turning nor slowing as the small farms and dark swamps flashed by.

Finally, the car slowed at a dirt road cut through the swamp. "It's a beautiful place back here," Amanda Trayn Woods advised, "as I'm sure you've heard." I looked towards her and nodded, befuddled, staring still at the dark earth and the black swamp-water outside of the car window as we turned down the dirt road.

After passing through the swamp, enormous trees in lines on either side of the drive rose up over us, and a long, rectangular lawn appeared beyond the trees to the left. At the end of the drive sat a large brick mansion, built to face the water on the other side, with a wide porch running the length of the house on the first floor, wrapped around the house on all sides. Ms. Woods pulled up next to the back door, and pointed at the house. "There's where you'll find your 'Dennis Smith', Mr. David Baxten Trigg."

Grabbing my bag out of the back seat, I opened the door next to me. "Thanks for everything, Ms. Woods... I,... thanks for the ride." All the questions refused to come out.

The old woman leaned over the long seat and put her hand on top of mine. "David, whatever you hear about the Trayns, just remember that we're civil people, just the same as you are. If your people want to talk, they should just march on over and we'll work all of this out. There's been too much loss and hurt over this already, long before you were even born."

Our eyes met as I put my hand on the door handle. Her eyes were familiar, and calm. I quickly and wordlessly stepped out of the car, and she departed down the dirt drive in a spray of dust. Turning, I looked at the house in front of me, which seemed vaguely familiar yet intimidating. The bricks themselves seemed old, but it was obvious that someone was living in the building, and had seen to the maintenance of the grounds. No car was in sight, and no garage visible.

I walked up the three steps to the porch and set down my bag and ran my fingers through my hair as I approached the rear door of the house. A small button, lit from the inside, triggered the doorbell. Hearing no noise from the inside of the house when I pushed the button, I rapped on the thick wooden door with my knuckles, the assertive 'thunk' resounding through the house.

Standing back from the door, I listened closely for the sound of footsteps within the house. Hearing none, I rapped again at the thick oak door, and again heard no response. Turning away from the door, I again surveyed the land behind the house for a car. Seeing none, I concluded that there was no one at home.

The house was occupied, I could tell, by someone who was fairly neat-- the items that were in view were all in order, even the tools hung out on pegs on the side of the house. Leaning on the porch rail, I became aware of the buzz of noise which surrounded the house. The chirping of crickets was joined by the deep-throated sounds of bullfrogs and the gentle swoosh of wind on leaves and tall grass. The noise was unfamiliar-- I had become accustomed to the dull throb of the bus.

Having limited myself to the back of the house, I followed the porch around the side to the front of the house, which faced one of the rivers which divided the islands and opened up to the larger sea. The front lawn leading down to the inlet was also clipped and cared for, as was made obvious by the wild grasses which formed the border of the yard. The front of the house was much grander than the back, though lacking the traditional white columns so often associated with Southern plantation homes. The windows were long and thin, arranged at regular intervals on either side of the front double doors and along the second floor facing the river. On either end of the building, tall chimneys reached another full story into the sky, and a third smaller chimney emerged from a smaller outbuilding off to the side of the main house. At the end of the walk leading from the main doors was a small dock, and I headed down to the water on a simple fieldstone path.

The dock appeared to be newly built, and the smell of fresh-cut pine hung in the air like a Korean-made auto air freshener. I sat on the dock, my legs hanging over the water, which moved in tiny increments under my feet as barely discernable fish slipped from piling to piling. I sat like this for several minutes. Lisa seemed very far away. I thought that she would hate this place that seemed comfortable to me; we had often discussed her loathing of the South.

I knew only that I was sent to Beaufort by Tenerife to find an escaped prison convict who called himself Dennis Smith. Ms. Woods had seemed familiar with the name, and my family, and had brought me here. To where? Why? Where was Dennis Smith? It didn't make sense to me that the old woman would seem to know so much more than I did, and the setting to which she had delivered me was more unusual still. It was an unlikely hideout for a supposedly indigent fugitive; the mysteries simply built one on top of the other. Less than 100 yards away, reeds were growing on the bank. I watched them sway and felt their rhythm. The pentameter was soothing; Reeds were a new phenomenon to me.

Turning back towards the house, I saw for the first time the entire front of the building. I was startled not by its design or immensity, however, but by a small sign attached to the top of the porch over the front door. The sign was faded but legible, black paint over white. Standing beneath the sign, I reached to touch the peeling paint, suddenly understanding. In once-bold letters, the sign said "Sedalia".

I backed up again over the lawn, looking at the house again in a new light. This was the house my Aunt had talked about, the house which had marked her for life, and which my father had never discussed. Where I was, I realized, was Frogmore. But why had I been sent? Conspiracy theories ran through my mind; perhaps my Aunt Sam had created this assignment as a ruse both to ruin my vacation and to get me to see my roots; I wouldn't put it past her, but I didn't think that Tenerife would so willingly allow herself to be used as part of such a plot.

The occupant, or occupants, of the house were not at home, and it was they who would clear the mystery up. Lugging my bag around to the back of the house once again, I sat down in one of the old wicker chairs which were set out on the porch. The solitude which had always pulled me away from danger and fear (by limiting my experiences to those which I could control) was now thrusting me into the unknown and the uncontrollable.

Beyond the trees, no cars rumbled by on the road. Instead, the noises of the woods became louder and more insistent. It was now nearly four in the afternoon, and I was again hungry. Reaching into the bag, at the bottom I found some peanuts from a long-ago adventure, and emptied the package into the palm of my hand, eating them one by one as I watched the road and the yard and listened for the sound of a car. The afternoon wore on, and the only sounds were of the animals unseen beyond the fringe of the yard. I felt the chill of the air more acutely, and pulled the sweater out of my bag and put it on. The new layer didn't help much. The chill had gotten inside of my skin, but as the sun went down gently in the west, I fell away into sleep.

To sleep in a large chair on a sunny afternoon on the porch of a large Southern home was familiar to me; I had a recurring dream in which I did just that. The dream was always the same, of sleeping curled up in a chair on the porch of a big, strange house with a certain air of danger. The dream had always frustrated me because there was no beginning or end, no resolution, and no suggestion of how I got there. My Mother listened to me as a small boy describe the dream of the house, and had rubbed my forehead with the flat of her hand as she told me about how nice it was that I would have such a dream. Calm words and a soft palm.

In the morning, I awoke to feel the dew forming on my face. For the second time in three nights I had slept in a seat, and my back was tense and stiff. Opening my eyes, I saw the porch rail, and the lawn, and the woods beyond, which were now eerily silent. Off to the left sat the blue sedan, parked on the dirt road at the side of the house. Slowly, the events of the previous evening came back to me, and I was able to remember the sounds of the woods and the forthright woman who had given me a ride, and finally the sign on the front of the house. I was at Sedalia.

My watch read 7:15, once I could coerce my eyes into focusing on it, and the light of the morning was coming fully out on the other side of the house. Sitting up, I pulled at my damp clothes. Before my fears overcame me and I had time to reconsider, I walked stiffly over to the door and knocked on it loudly.

Still adjusting my balance to the new day and the slight slant of the damp porch boards, I heard a hoarse male voice answer my knock: "Come in, already!" I pushed the door inward.

Inside the house to the left was a large parlor, extensively and expensively outfitted with cherrywood furniture and a thick carpet which was a deep maroon. To the right was a large oak-panelled dining room. I guessed that the man who had spoken to me was at the far side of the dining room, and I stepped cautiously that way, past a large wooden china cabinet.

Sitting at the table was a large but not fat man, tall, with a craggy face that revealed little about his age but hinted that his years had been spent either outdoors or in some very worrisome profession. There was a single scar running down the side of his face below his ear to the base of his neck. His hair was dark save for a white streak over his temple. In front of the man sat a hearty breakfast of eggs and ham, which was matched by an identical plate set on the side of the table. The man looked up at me expectantly. His face looked familiar, but every face was beginning to look familiar to me in the Low Country.

I thrust my hands into my pockets and threw out my quest: "Are you Dennis Smith?"

The man leaned back and smiled slightly, amused. "So sayeth you. Are you Buddy Trigg?"

I nodded silently, thinking. He stared at me, his expression flat. "How do you know my name? Did Tenerife tell you?"

"I," said the man, "am your Great-Grandfather's second grandson, your brother's grandmother's son, your second cousin's cousin. Now do you know?"

I was getting better at riddles as life grew more surreal. "You're my father's brother," I replied, getting it. The world, this new world, was falling into place.

"Yes," said the man, "deceased, thank you."

"With all due respect, sir, if you're my Uncle Ennis, this is all getting a little too Twilight Zone for me, thanks." I put a hand on the back of the chair at the far end of my Uncle's seat, steadying myself.

"I am, and if I frightened you, I'm sorry. There's just too many surprises out there as it is," Ennis said, "and I hate to add to anyone's state of confusion. We'll talk after breakfast. Here-- sit, eat."

I took the proffered seat, pulling the full plate closer to me. My head was too abuzz even to form any coherent questions. The man before me had created a sort of reverse-revelation: His existence settled only one question, which I had never asked myself, but raised others which I could never have dreamed of.

He watched me eat with a wry smile. He seemed to like the fact that I was so hungry for his food. As I finished the first helping, he disappeared to the kitchen, returned with a metal pan of scrambled eggs and pushed the remainder onto my plate.

"You know, I had a feeling that you were going to show up here, that you would be the one to come down. I saw you once when you were real little. You were a weird little guy, man. You had one of those quack-quack ducks that you pull behind you, but you were scared of it and as you pulled it you ran faster and faster, trying to get away from it. That was the last time I saw you, Buddy."

I had heard this nauseating story innumerable times from fawning relatives, but as told by this apparent stranger it seemed more deeply humiliating.

Before I could interrupt, he began speaking again. "You really look like your grand-daddy; I guess everyone probably tells you that. Your Daddy has that look, too; I don't know how it passed me by, but I think that I turned out all right just the way that I am. Except for the prison and all."

His self-confident smile was familiar; it was the smile my own father had when things were going well and the family was happy. It was the look he had in the driver's seat as we pulled into the driveway at the end of a good trip.

Leaning forward over the empty plate, I asked, a little too loudly, "So which are you? Dennis Smith or Uncle Ennis? I came too far to be toyed with."

"Well, now, I guess that what I am is both, really. See, in prison I was Dennis Smith because I had no real interest in them finding Ennis Trigg once I was out of prison, so that's who I was. But now I can go back to being Ennis again. It all makes sense to me; doesn't that make sense to you, Buddy?"

"All right," I responded, "But..."

Ennis interrupted me abruptly. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions, but right now we're going hunting. You ever shoot a shotgun?"

Guns. I had long feared them, especially after Mark's death, but I knew that this was the wrong place and time to show that fear. "Sure, in camp once, but that was a while ago," I said calmly. The mystery's unravelling so occupied me that I didn't fully consider the implications of going into the woods with an armed prison escapee who appeared to be my dead Uncle.

"Well then, it's time you went duck hunting," he implored, reaching behind him to a gun case, from which he removed two shotguns. Holding one of the weapons in each hand, he leaned towards me. "There's one thing I want to straighten out right away, Buddy. How old are you?"

"I'm thirty," I answered, my eyes on the shotguns.

"Well, thirty is too old to be known by a childish name like 'Buddy'. Damn! It sounds like a dog or something. It's time you stopped being called Buddy. I'll call you 'Dave'. Sounds a little more average, I know, but at least I'll feel like I'm hunting with someone old enough to handle a gun, right?"

"Sure," I said, trying not to sound meek. No one, including me, had ever questioned the fact that "Buddy" would be my identification for life. My friends had always called me that, and it in fact had been a useful point of differentiation between those who knew me and those who didn't--strangers called me David, to the stifled laughter of my friends. No one, however, had ever called me the less formal 'Dave', but I was not about to argue with a felon brandishing firearms.

Ennis walked heavily out the front of the house through the open door, the guns still in his large hands. As I looked at him, I began to see the similarities to my father, and their differences. My father, on sight, could be identified as someone who was urban, who had lived a life which demanded a certain neatness, while Ennis exhibited exactly the opposite tendency, towards the earthy appeal of calluses and facial hair.

As I backed through the door, Ennis continued his thoughts on the subject of my name. "There ain't nothing wrong with the name Buddy, if you don't give a damn what people think of you. But nobody's going to be even a little bit scared of a guy they call 'Buddy'. Whether you want to admit it or not-- and your Daddy doesn't-- fear is an important part of any relationship. If I fear you, I respect you, right? You start up with somebody, some girl, and if she don't fear you at all, nothing good is going to happen. I don't mean scared that you're going to hurt her or anything; just scared that maybe she won't know what you're going to do, won't know how you're going to react every time. Too much safety-- that's what kills it, every time."

"I've never really had a problem with giving women too much security, to tell you the truth," I interjected, hoping to salvage myself in my Uncle's eyes.

"Sure," the Uncle said cynically, boring of the topic. He opened the chamber of one of the shotguns. "How much you know about these firesticks?" he asked me, handing me the gun.

"Not much," I said, hefting the gun with both hands. It was heavier than I expected, far heavier than the .22 rifles we had fired at camp many years before. There was a certain heft to it, a solidness that differentiated it from other machines that I had held. The gun felt solid in my grip, and I ran my hand down the cold steel of the bore to get a better feel for it. The steel itself was cool to the touch and felt clean in a way that only cold metal does. The morning light struck the barrel and enhanced the rough copper color, tempering the chill of it. I felt an impulse to stick out my tongue and taste the steel, but refrained.

"The break there, that's where you load the cartridge in. Now, when you fire, the spent cartridge will eject so that you can load up again. This little switch on the side is the safety. Always keep the safety on until you spot whatever it is that you want to shoot. Then you flick off the safety, sight down the line of the barrel, and fire from the shoulder. Don't forget about the kick; the gun, any gun, always kicks a little when you shoot, so be ready, but don't let that affect your aim." Ennis handed me three shells, which I put in my pocket. They too felt oddly heavy, filling up my palm and fingers.

"Let's load one before we go." Ennis took my shotgun and inserted a shell in the open breach, then closed the gun and

pointedly switched on the safety. "Always walk with the gun facing the ground, away from you and away from me. Even with the safety on."

I nodded somberly. There was something about the possession of the gun which gave my Uncle authority beyond the simple and obvious power to kill; it vested him with a level of comfort which I had not seen in my own father except at work. There were a thousand questions I had for the man, and one request, but we were in the midst of a ritual which needn't be disturbed. I had no idea what it was that we were hunting for, and was unsure whether I would even be able to go through the act of killing. Mark, a vegetarian, had often chastised me for eating meat that came prepackaged from the store in sealed and wrapped containers which insulated me from the reality that an animal had been violently killed for the meal. I had let such criticisms roll off of me, content to relax in the comfortable excuse that I was in no position to kill off the birds of Kenilworth. Today I would find out.

I followed my Uncle in silence down the long dirt driveway, looking briefly into the passenger compartment of the blue sedan as we passed it. On the front seat was a powerful flashlight and a book, the title of which I could not make out, but which appeared to be old and weathered. My Uncle walked quickly, and I had to redouble my pace to keep up as we passed under the tall, precise trees which lined the drive. There was a charge to the movement of walking with the heavy, solid gun under my arm. It did impart a feeling of power, of belonging in that place.

On the main road, we took a right, and walked near the ditch. An older black man approached us, and nodded as he came close. "How y'all, Mr. Trigg?"

"Doin' fine, Ty," responded Ennis, looking straight ahead as we passed. I turned slightly to watch the black man as he continued the opposite direction, a weathered brown hat on his head. Looking into the woods on the right, I was surprised to see that there were cabins far back in the trees, and wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys.

A few thousand yards down the road, Ennis lead me to a broad trail through the woods, which rose up over the swampy ground and was sloped on either side. The trail was very old, but had been well maintained by those who used it. In the woods, I again heard the cries of unfamiliar animals, and strained my eyes fruitlessly to see signs of human habitation. My Uncle was leading me still farther into the unknown, still silent.

The scene reminded me of books I had read as a child, in which a boy and his father or uncle or grandfather head off into the woods hunting together-- biographies of frontiersmen such as Davy Crockett. Growing up in Kenilworth, the scenes had seemed as strange as stories about ancient Egypt, and gave me the uneasy feeling that I was missing out on some sort of crucial American childhood experience. Now I was stepping into that world.

The weight of the steel in my hands, the dryness of the crisp early-fall air, the trail through the woods; there was something deeply, primally satisfying about the moment, though I was walking behind a man who, if he was who he claimed, proved that at least much of what I had grown up believing was apparently a lie.

The trail finally broke through the trees at a broad river which to our right connected to the larger sea. The scene was breathtaking, with the sun bursting through the trees to illuminate the expanse of water. Ennis lead me to a small wooden structure which sat off near the edge of the woods, hanging slightly over the water. It was constructed in the style of a tree-house, with barely enough room for the two of us to sit down on the wooden bench which faced outward towards the water through a window-hole cut in the boards.

Ennis sat down solidly on the wooden board and looked purposefully out over the marsh. I joined him, still curious as to what it was we were hunting. I had never heard of such tree-houses used for hunting, but appreciated the location of the perch, which afforded a magnificent view of the water and land.

Ennis made no motion which would lead to a shot being fired; he simply was surveying the water in front of him, looking from side to side slyly. Very quietly, pointing at a small flock of ducks off to the side of the marsh, he said, "there."

So it was ducks that we were after. It did not seem like much of a challenge; the ducks sat pacifically on the water not more than seventy feet away, and from my own brief experience with guns, they seemed to be well within range. Leaning towards my Uncle, I whispered, "so what happens? Do we just shoot at them or do we wait?"

Ennis' face was marked with disdain for the question; obviously, it was not a correct assumption that we would just blast the birds out of the water. "Wait 'til they flush. Keep your gun down until I raise mine."

Ennis' annoyance confused me almost as much as his response. "Flush" was a new term to me in this context. It would seem that the only thing he could be referring to was flight; that we would not shoot at the birds until they were in flight. This left me with another question. I had always thought that duck hunters travelled with dogs, and that the dogs carried the ducks back to the hunters, but Ennis had no dog. We sat silently looking at the woods, a bare inch separating us on the thick pine board. The air was fragrant, with the smell of the swamp being much more pleasant than I would have thought, mixed with the wood of the structure and the faint odor of smoke, the source of which I could not identify. The silence did not scare me, though I stifled a compulsion to look and stare at this man who claimed to be my Uncle and who seemed so much a part of the environment. The lies! Why had my father lied to me about my Uncle? Why had my family's identity been kept from me? Why had this place been hidden?

I had left my watch in my bag, but guessed that we had been in the duck blind for at least three hours. Already, I was hungry again. There was a motion at the far end of the river, the end near the river's mouth. The blur flashing in the sky was large, with long legs trailing behind it, echoing the length and elegance of the reeds below. It wheeled around in the air, turning towards the curve of the river before us. The crane was like a slightly awkward arrow in flight as it approached the water with a furious flapping of wings. I noticed that Ennis, sitting silently beside me, tensed and raised his gun slightly, his eyes narrowing.

The crane touched the water with its feet at the mid-point of the river, almost before us, and the water splashed up beside it. Suddenly, there was a flurry of wings as the ducks, seemingly on command, began to flap their wings and run along the water, lifting off just as Ennis lifted his gun and pivoted sharply towards them.

I reacted more slowly. Seeing the muzzle of my Uncle's gun rise inches from my own face, I pulled the barrel of my own shotgun up with my left hand and planted the butt on my shoulder. Ennis was tracing the path of the birds along the water in front of us, his left eye closed. Sharply he whispered, "Now!"

I fired, my eye set on the first duck out of the water. As I pulled the trigger, Ennis took his eye away from his own sight and watched as a single duck, the lead bird, collapsed within itself and fell into the water in the reeds near the shore. I watched the flight change to a drop, horrified and fascinated, as the dead bird fell with a crashing noise into the brush.

"Sort of wondered whether you would do that or not," said Ennis, a small smile on his rugged face. "Guess you did."

I looked in the direction of the fallen bird, and saw a narrow line of bent grass. The noise had been tremendous, exploding next to my ear, and there had been a palpable feeling of heat emanating from the gun when it had fired. The full destructive force of the act overwhelmed me. The rest of the flock had continued up and off the river, and turned left over the trees soundlessly but for the flapping of their wings.

"Leave your gun here. Switch the safety back on," Ennis instructed, pointing to the corner of the hut.

I followed Ennis, who had also set his gun down in the corner, and followed him down and out of the blind. The ground below was soft and wet; my boat shoes sunk into the muck a full inch with each step. Pushing the reeds aside, Ennis lead the way through the swamp in large green boots, the breadth of his callused hands clearing a path. We were almost upon the fallen bird when the ground became still soggier and I felt my shoes slip under the muck with each step, only emerging with great effort and a loud slurping sound.

Ennis grabbed the fallen bird, turned towards me and said conspiratorially, "good shot, Dave." As Ennis stood again, the bird in his hand, I saw the blood on his fingers, the dark red, warm stain dripping over his knuckle. Oddly, the sight of this blood did not repulse me, but rather seemed to fit the man and the prize. We returned to the duck blind, retrieved our guns, and walked back towards the road on the raised path through the swampy land, me following at two paces.

My first kill. There was a smell of death around the bird. It scared me that I liked it.

"So, how did you like hunting, Dave?" Ennis said loudly, his voice booming through the trees.

I looked out in the woods. "Well, it seems like a better-than-average excuse for sitting out in the woods with some guys. Truth to tell, I never thought that I'd like it."

"Well," said Ennis, "that's because you never did it with me before. I make no excuses for the things I do, and if I kill something and eat it, it seems more honest that buying some frozen butt steak. I live here, the duck lives here, I eat it.

Silently, I considered the fearsome consequences such an argument might have met from Mark L., who had been brought down, ironically, by a gun himself. The thought took the edge off of the touch of bravado that I felt at the kill in my Uncle's hand. The vision of Mark lying dead with bullets lodged in him flashed before me again, the blood on the broken cement as the blood was now on the hands of my Uncle.

The moment passed, however, unlike many of the other times that the memory of Mark had brought me down for hours. The sounds of the woods again enveloped me, and the smell of the early fall, and the streaks of sunlight breaking through the branches of the trees over the path took me over. My Uncle walked with light steps for such a big man, and quickly; I had to go faster than my normal Chicago pace to keep up.

Passing back into the house, I noticed that the door had not been locked and that only the screen door kept us from entering unimpeded. The opposite doors on the front of the house were open as well, and a breeze blew through. Ennis hung the duck out on the porch from a wire, a scene which I could see through one of the tall windows. The height of the windows was striking; they opened up the indoors to the light and space above us.

My bag stood near the china cabinet where I had dropped it. When Ennis passed back into the house through the front door, I caught his eye. "So, Uncle, where you going to put me up? Can I get a shower?"

"You haven't told me a damn thing about what you're doing here, Dave, though I gotta say that I had a feeling you'd show up. What the hell you doing here?" His face showed a challenge.

"Actually, it's about your case. Or, Dennis Smith's case, anyways. If you don't answer some questions, they're going to drop the case. I guess that if you do answer, the whole thing goes on."

Sitting at the heavy wooden table, Ennis nodded as I looked through my bag in search of the interrogatories. He watched me with a detached air that made me feel like a lawyer.

His gaze eventually shifted to the window as my search continued. "Well, I guess that I want the money if I can get it. They treated me like crap, you know. I'm just a little poor in my business practices, and they go and treat me like I killed the President. So I'll get mine. I know what the story is, anyways, on Cruel and Unusual Punishment. It's a Constitutional right.

I stopped hunting through the bag, having finally found the papers, and looked up at him. He was picking at the edge of the wooden table with a cracked and ragged fingernail.

"Well, here's the story. I went by Dennis Smith when they put me in. It's not like they can require positive ID for admission. They have to admit you. So that way, I can use my real name and all down here, where it means something, and they won't track me. That's what the Dennis Smith story was. That's all. I'm not ashamed of the family or anything."

"So why are you dead, then? I mean, why did everyone say you were dead? My Dad talks about you like you were important and..., well, why aren't you dead if you're supposed to be?"

Ennis looked up with a hard look. "There's a lot of time to answer all the questions, kid; we don't have to turn over every rock right away, all right? Let's not do that. Give me the papers. Tenerife send you here?"

I handed him the envelope. "Yeah, she sent me here. She had an idea where you were, but she sure didn't seem to know who you were."

"That was the idea. Your Dad's idea."

"Yeah, well, it came as a pretty big surprise to me. Who owns this house? Was this the family house?"

"Too many questions, Dave, so stop already. I'll do these tomorrow. You can stay in the big room to the left upstairs." He waved towards the stairs with his hand. The tone of his voice told me that I was being dismissed from the room. I took my bag and, shoeless, climbed the hard wooden stairs to the second floor.

The house had been restored recently and flawlessly, no doubt by Ennis. The wooden floors were sanded and stained with care-- they were cool and smooth under my bare feet. In the bedroom, I found a large oak bed, a tremendously heavy-looking bureau, and an attached bathroom with an enclosed stall shower.

Taking off my muddy, sweaty clothes, I stepped into the shower and turned on the warm stream, which crashed into my body with an unfamiliar rush. We didn't have this kind of water pressure in Kenilworth. "Whose money," I thought, "did this? Who paid for this house, renovated it, kept it up?" Of all the homes in Kenilworth, not one seemed so attuned to its surroundings, so fitting to its placement, nor so welcoming and warm. The banisters and moldings and mantlepieces were made of a rich cherrywood. The scent of the house was that of wood and linen from the dryer.

As I stepped out of the shower, I heard a car start, and got to the window just in time to see the blue sedan pull out of the driveway. I put on a robe and walked down to the now-vacated first floor. The grandfather clock at the head of the stairs read five o'clock, and I wondered where the time had gone, but the evidence that it had was reaffirmed by the growling of my stomach.

In the refrigerator, I found smoked salmon and cheese, which I set on a plate with some crackers. Sitting at the table in the robe, I felt decadent. Sharing the house with my Uncle was unlike sharing a house with my father. Though both seemed to have a predilection for silence, this house seemed as much mine as my Uncle's; in fact, the fine decoration of the house seemed a little out of sorts with the rougher tastes of its apparent occupant. The house reminded me a little of Lisa, who would have enjoyed the clean lines and open spaces of the building. I allowed myself briefly the thought of her, and did not release the thought from my mind until I saw her before me. I imagined the two of us living in the house, putting furniture on the porch in the spring. This was the world that I wished I could have given her, the world I wished I could have made her want. A world with both of us in it.

I imagined showing her the house for the first time, each room like a present to be carefully opened and explained for the recipient, doors opened with anticipation. Taking my plate to the kitchen, I walked through to the other side of the first floor to find a small, rough-hewn bedroom on the far side, with a small sitting area in the corner containing a rough wooden table and a lamp. A back door there lead directly to steps off of the sweeping porch, and I followed a little path down to the small out-building I had spotted before. Inside was a storage area containing a boat, motors, and water sports accoutrements. The countertops revealed it to have been a kitchen at one time, with a large open hearth and fireplace.

Walking back into the house, I stepped through the parlor into a den I had not before discovered, with wooden bookshelves lining the walls and a television facing a pair of couches on either side of a small fireplace. I pulled out one of the books, an ancient edition of Ivanhoe, and opened it to the first page. In fading pen, the book was signed, "To E.B. Trigg, my fellow nemesis of Saxton and most steadfast friend. Robert Barnwell Rhett, Beaufort S.C." The script was stiff, like sticks falling together on the ground.

The feeling of the den, despite the relatively new furniture and the small television, was that of the reading room of a man to whom building a library was seen as a necessary preoccupation. The bulk of the shelves were filled with very old copies of books I had not heard of; only in the very lowest shelves did I find books that had been written in my own lifetime. There is a smell to books that has always moved me. At Williams, I had retreated at times to the library simply to sit in a heavy chair surrounded by the stacks, hoping that Sarabeth would come by. There was a sensuousness to the calm I found there.

Rising from the floor, where I had been lying looking at titles, I again climbed the stairs of the house to the largest of the bedrooms, which was dominated by a massive canvas along one wall, a painting on it partially completed. The painting was abstract, green lines and blue splotches running over a white background and intersecting. I stood back to look at the painting, which obviously was a work-in-progress. The flow of the colors reminded me of the river we had watched in the morning, though there was no true physical resemblance. It simply matched the scene we hunters had revelled in, and then destroyed, in tone and expression and color, if not in shape and form. I had never felt that I had "gotten" art that was abstract in any way, always being the first to laugh and say that it was possible to call anything "art", but this was something different. It resonated with an unrecognized part of me. I had walked that morning with a loaded shotgun, an armful of violence, in my hands, and that was in the lines and shapes. One week earlier, I would not have felt the connection.

There was a third room in the upstairs, a large rectangle with windows on three sides overlooking the water and the dock. In this room were wooden benches arranged along the side of the room, and unlabelled portraits on the fourth wall looked down over the room and the lawn and the water. The center portrait, the oldest, was of a severe man with a high white collar. The man in the portrait bore a certain resemblance to my namesake, whom I had seen only in photographs.

I sat on one of the wooden benches as the sun went down outside, casting a fiery red over the river's water. I wondered what the room was used for; it seemed to have been designed for meetings of some sort. Attached to it was a small pantry, connected by a dumb-waiter to the kitchen below.

A fourth room turned out to be a bedroom, smaller than the others, unusual only in that a high bedstand held a single photograph of a woman I recognized as my grandmother. She was a tall, strong woman whose eyes stirred with resolve. There was a continuity to the photographs in the house, a sameness in the subjects in that each conveyed a certainness of purpose. This surprised me, as I had associated my family simply with good fortune, in that they had lived a comfortable life and seemed reasonably appreciative of it. These pictures spoke of something more: a resolve to succeed.

Returning to the first floor, I launched a search for a telephone, hoping to call Tenerife. I started in the obvious places, looking on the end tables at either end of the couch in the living room and den, the kitchen, and the countertops of the service areas. Unsuccessful, I looked in drawers and under furniture, finding nothing.

Turning on the lights, I wandered the house again, soaking up detail: The way the lights had been placed, the design of the chairs, the solid feel of the doors. It was as if some deity had brought me there and said "this is your real house." It was mine, not in the sense that I owned it, but in the sense that I belonged in it. Though disjoined from the woman I loved, my best friend, and my heretofore known family, I had arrived home.

Before retiring to bed, I pulled a copy of Plato's Republic from the den shelf and carried it up the stairs, reading it until I dropped off to sleep, stretched out under an ancient quilt.

In the morning, the sun fell into the room unimpeded, and I woke easily. I showered and then, wearing fresh clothes, hurried down the steps and turned to face the dining room. There, again, was the smell of a fresh-cooked breakfast.

"Hey," Ennis grunted as he dipped his fork under a small pile of scrambled eggs. "Sorry, but there's no hunting today. Have a good sleep?"

"Sure, great house. Whose house is this?"

Ennis looked up at me briefly over the steaming food as I began to eat. "It's our house. Whose damn house did you think it is?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I just thought there was a little history here. I looked around some last night."

"Well, this is the house our people come from. Trigg Plantation, that goes from here down to the end of the island. Been here for a long time, since E.B. Trigg built it in 1835. That's the older E.B.; he had a son by the same name who fixed it up a lot, added the porch and so on. Been pretty much the same ever since, though lately we've had to do some fixing up."

The truth came as no surprise to me, as I had solved that particular mystery. "But who keeps it up? I mean, it looks like there's been pretty extensive upkeep on the place..."

A look of irritation crossed Ennis' face. "Your father, of course. Who do you think? He didn't tell you that? I own the damn place, since your father got all of the money, but he's got an affection for it. Or at least he has since your mother died. He spent two or three months here after that, mostly in that room that you're in. That was before I was in prison, of course, so we had some time together. It was interesting. It was the only time I've seen your Daddy drinking."

I flinched at the vision Ennis had applied to my always-dignified father. I did vaguely remember the period after my mother's death, when I was sent to stay with Aunt Sam in her home, which smelled odd and was filled with foods that seemed old even when fresh-- lemon drops, blue cheese, squash. Ennis' accent was intriguing-- a cross between the soft curve downward of the region and the sharper Chicago voice of my father.

"So," I asked, "why didn't my Dad tell me about this, about you? Where have you been?"

"You'll have to ask your Dad, Dave, OK? It's not like I haven't seen him. Hell, he was here last week. He doesn't know what all I'm up to, but he paid to have the place all fixed up. He comes down and pays the people who do all the work, people from Hilton Head. As for me, I've been right here most of the time, until I got sent up about five years ago. Grew up here, went to school here, raised myself. Only went to Illinois to do my crime and do my time. They said that I hijacked a truck full of radios, but they didn't have anything on me. I did it, but they couldn't prove nothing. If they knew the half of it... Anyways, I got sent up, I got out, I came back, and the only one who knows is your Dad. And if he tells, he loses his license to practice law, because he's known all along that I've been here." With that, Ennis scraped his fork tines along his plate, gathering the last piece of bacon. There was a small bit of bacon caught in his beard, and he stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth to gather it up.

"Another thing I was wondering..."

Ennis interrupted my query by throwing Tenerife's envelope across the table at me. "There you go. Mission accomplished, Dave. If you want to go, go, but if you want to stay, then stay. This will be your place someday; hell, it is already. Do whatever you want."

I pushed my plate away and leaned back from the table. "I think that I'll stay for awhile." I said this without thinking first. I really had no reason to go back to Chicago, as Lisa was gone, and my job impossible given that I had gone against the express wishes of the most powerful man in the firm. My father had suddenly become a mystery to me. I could mail the interrogatories to Tenerife.

Ennis picked up the two shotguns, some rags, and some polish and went out to the front porch facing the river. I followed him out the front door and pulled up a chair next to him as he disassembled the guns. There was a certain precision to the way he pulled the parts away from one another and placed them in rows.

"Vietnam," the older man said, "that's the difference between me and your daddy. I learned this as a boy, but I learned why it was important over there, where you have to know your weapon. Know your weapon. That's a theory that works in a lot of areas, if you ask me.

"Vietnam I got out of all right, more out of luck than anything else. They just sent us to where we didn't get shot at, but that didn't make it any easier-- it was the fear that turned all those guys nuts, the fear of the jungle and the night. It'd be dark, and you didn't know what was out there. I didn't have to go-- I signed up. I was your age, I guess. I wanted to try it. Everyone else, they was nineteen or eighteen. Anyways, what I did in Chicago, any other guy would have gotten probation, what with no record, nothing. But I get this smart-ass lawyer who gets up and says over and over that I'm some messed up Vietnam Veteran and that I gave my sanity for my country and all that. So, she goes on like that for maybe a half hour, telling my story, and then she's done. The Judge, colored man, he leans down over the bench and says 'so what unit you in over there?' I tells him I was a Navy Seal, the truth. 'Which unit?' he asks, and I tell him. Well, it turns out he was a Seal himself, in another unit that saw action the whole tour, shooting every night. The guy just about had a fit over the whole thing, about how I was using this as my defense and how he came back and worked through law school, and on and on. That was it. Seven years, no credit for time served."

Ennis shook his head slowly as he finished the story and cleaned the parts of the shotgun. "So that's why I say 'know your weapon'; that lady lawyer didn't know hers, not in my case. So I got sent up."

I imagined the voice of the judge, full of indignation.

"Full moon last night," Ennis said abruptly, "incredible light, yellow light, right over the water out here."

"The moon, yeah, that's beautiful. I don't know if my parents, well, my dad, told you about this, but I was in the Peace Corps over in Africa for a few years after college. It was pretty weird over there, at first, all desert. Anyways, it seemed funny to me that it didn't seem like the same moon over there. I mean, it didn't really look the same as the moon over here. I'd look at it, but I couldn't see the man in the moon or the rabbit or whatever it is that people see in the moon over here. It was funny, but it was just impossible to look at it like that. Anyways, I started to notice that all of the people would sit outside and watch the moon come up. Just sit there, like me, looking at it come up. One old woman told me that she believed that the moon travelled over the Earth in the night and looked down at the people and judged them, judged how fair and just they had been. If the moon was pleased, it would pull behind it a raincloud, which would rain over the fields and allow the crops to grow. I guess that this was how the moon would heal the ravages of the bad God, the sun, which would dry everything up and make it die."

Ennis looked bored with my story, and shook his head. "You go all over the world trying to find some interesting culture, but you never thought to look right here! What kind of a shallow, disconnected nobody are you? You go telling me some kind of story about way the hell over the other side of the world, and then you wander off to here, to where the people come from that made you. Your people were here, and you never bothered to find out, never bothered to see who we were, where we lived, what our culture was before you went off wandering around. There's thousands of you damn kids, all over the world, wandering around, trying to find out who you want to be, but none of you give a damn about who you were or where you were from before you set off! You go off to Africa and learn them stories, fine, but do you know who you are before you go? Being a Trigg, being part of the oldest family on St. Helena, that didn't mean a God-damn to you, and now you just sort of wander on down to see it because some colored woman sent you here on assignment. God Damn you!" His ferocity was overwhelming.

I had expected my story to warm up Ennis to me, and I shrunk back away from the table as my Uncle delved into his frenzy. The hurtful part, of course, was that he was right. I had defined myself by my wanderings, rather than where I was from, and my presence and comfort on the island only served to make this seem more ridiculous.

Ennis, calming, picked up the barrel of one of the shotguns. "The Germans have a word for it, you know, Weldshmerz. They call it that when you just feel bad for the world, when the world is a damn burden. You people, you wanderers, you get it because you never figure out where the hell you come from, so you wander from place to place to feel the pain of everybody else. Screw that."

"All right, I'm sorry," I finally replied, with Ennis still glowering on the other side of the table. Saying "I'm sorry" seemed grotesquely inadequate.

Ennis stood and paced behind the chair. "See, this is the difference between your father and me, Goofus and Gallant. He got where he was by running away from it all and getting along with everyone. He didn't want to be a part of this, a part of us, he just wanted to divorce the whole family, and I let him do it. He's ashamed of what it was that made him, and now he's made his nickel by getting along with everyone. That don't play for long down here. Not long at all, what with us and the colored," Ennis concluded, again sitting before the partially-reassembled gun. I hated the way he said "colored", a term that had probably fallen out of favor before his generation entered adulthood. Its use seemed calculated to offend me.

"So why didn't he tell me about this, about you?" I asked.

"Your Daddy wants to believe in the one America thing, where we all are alike and get along. Total bullshit, but easy to say from out where you live. He used to lecture me about how we had the whole slavery thing on our hands, on how the coloreds would come and get us out of the swamp, out of the plantation. He couldn't face it, so he ran away to Chicago. Your Aunt Sam, too, she ran away from here because she believed him, like Saxton was going to come back and drive us all out again."

"Saxton? Who's Saxton?"

"Him? You don't know? I thought you went to college. The bane of the Sea Islands. See, by the time the war came along, there was a lot of money flowing out of here; a lot of money. Rice and cotton. On St. Helena, which was called Frogmore then, there were about twenty big plantations, and this was one of them. Each plantation had one white family and a couple hundred slaves, and it was a cash machine. That's the money that your Aunt Sam is living off still. They say that this island had a population of over 10,000, but only a couple hundred was white." Telling the story, Ennis turned from the guns, and the anger in his face from the moments before dissipated. Waving his hands as he spoke, he had the incantational rhythm of a stump preacher.

"When the hotheads up in Charleston started the war, they thought they would be able to protect themselves because of the fort, but they left us up to dry. The first thing the Yankees did was park about fifty ships on the Atlantic, right at the mouth of the Broad River, and they blasted the forts at Bay Point and Hilton Head. There were a lot of guns on the island and in Beaufort, but they were for stopping a slave revolt, not for beating back a navy. Almost all of the planters left for the up-country, running up to the flatlands with as much of their wealth as they could carry, which wasn't much. The Union soldiers, sailors really, came into the town and took it for the Yankees before the war even really got going. They put a General Saxton in charge, and he killed the town. With all the planters gone off to the war or off to the up-country, there was no one left living in the houses, houses like this. Some of them got turned into the hospitals and so on; the best of all, Robert Barnwell Rhett's house, got turned into Saxton's headquarters. What they did was divide up the plantations and give them to the coloreds. They gave the colored these little tiny plots to farm, and some even moved into the big house. One colored man, Uncle Robert Smalls, bought one of the houses in town after the war at a tax sale. He was some kind of Union war hero-- took over a ship.

That killed the whole thing-- the war-- and the island never really made it back. The coloreds just stay on their little plots, just stay up there and grow whatever they can, which isn't much."

"What about this house? How did we get it back?"

"We never left. E.B. Trigg, everybody called him Whitlock, he stayed in the house and sent his family to the upcountry. Funny story, really, that they called him Whitlock. They called him that because of the white hair on the side of his temple, same as you and me. Hereditary, but your Daddy dyes it. They called me Whit, too, in the Navy.

"Anyways, some of the coloreds tried to take the house after the plantation got broken up by the Yankees, but he shot a pile of them right on the lawn. They're still buried there, right where they fell. So long as he gave up the land, and it was a lot of land, Saxton let him stay in the house. Story is, Saxton even came out here to borrow books once in a while, but Whitlock made sure that he was gone when Saxton came by. Yankee walked right past that pile of coloreds and kept on going, got his book, and went back out."

It was a gruesome story, and the racial subtext brought out the worst part of my Uncle. It made me understand why my father had left, but it didn't answer all of the questions. "So this isn't all our land anymore?"

"Nope. Not since the war. The same coloreds that got it then have it now, some of them in the same old shacks. You go back there and look; they're harmless enough. See, they don't have the money to move and we don't have the money to buy. But things are changing around here. You met our Amanda Trayn Woods I heard. She's a fine one, let me tell you. She and her family went and bought out all of the coloreds on their old plantation and put up condos and a golf course and made themselves filthy rich. The Trayns' hate us because we voted against them on the development, and they never forgot. That's the new war, the development."

I fingered one of the polished pieces of the second gun. "Why's it a war? What's the big problem?"

"See, when the developments go up on part of the island, it raises the tax rate for everybody, because the assessed value goes up. The coloreds, they don't make money, so they can't pay the taxes, and anybody can come in and buy the place at a tax auction, and the coloreds don't know what happened. It's sort of a God-damned-funny twist on the trick they pulled after the war, when they sold off the big houses at tax auction. "We'll get ours."

Ennis finished reassembling the two shotguns, rose from his seat, and put one in the gun case. Carrying the other, he walked towards the front of the house. Halfway across the lawn, he turned. "What religion are you, Dave?" he asked, his eyes piercing.

"Methodist."

With a look of disgust, Ennis turned back towards the outside. "God damn. Same as it ever was. Might as well be a potion-waving Catholic." The shotgun in his hand, Ennis walked out into the yard, opened the trunk of the car, and threw the gun in. Quickly moving himself into the front seat, Ennis spun the car around and exited the driveway in a flurry of dust.

I hated him already, but I loved listening to him. I returned to the kitchen and washed the plates that sat near the sink.

Lisa. I looked at my words through her eyes, and thought about giving up the passing on of a culture. My father had done just that, and I burned with anger at him, for hiding what was our history, ugly as it was. As a child, I had often received a lecture on the fact that lives are made by individuals, and that each person is invested with the utter freedom to do what he or she wants. Implicit in this theology, I now realized, was the utter worthlessness of family history. My father's escape made sense.

My anger at being robbed of all this fueling my decision. I knew that there was nothing left for me in Chicago, and there was no apparent need for money at Sedalia. This would be my home, at least for a while, and I would quiz my Uncle for all of the knowledge that I had been denied. The answer to that girl in Chicago laid within those walls, I hoped.

The full sun of mid-day was now over the water, and I stood on the front porch watching the light play off of the water. Feeling confined, I decided to explore the area a bit, and set off down the driveway and onto the main road. Whereas I had walked to the right with my Uncle, I now walked off to the left, towards the town. The road was dry and untravelled, and I walked in the middle of it, down the yellow line. Off to the side I saw the small homes and trailers. Many of the people were out in the fields or gardens, which were ringed by elegant borders made of shells. Behind one of the tiny two-room houses was a barbecue pit, with dark smoke curling out of the chimney and into the air above, laden with the smell of beef and pork. In an open field, a group of women were erecting a large, open tent, and carrying in chairs. I watched them work until they began to return my gaze. They saw me at about the time that I surmised that they were preparing for a revival meeting, evidenced by a large wooden pulpit which sat off to one side. I wished that they would invite me over. They did not.

Walking further down the road, I reached a structure which I had glimpsed on my initial ride in with Amanda Trayn Woods: The ruin of a stone building which no longer had a roof, and in which tall grasses had grown up through the tall, empty windows. I approached the amazing relic with wide eyes; I had not seen the ruin of anything in my own country, and this looked to be the abandoned temple of some ancient religion. Looking closely, I saw that the walls were not made of stone, but of a mass of broken shells, which had been mortared together. I looked through one of the empty windows and up through the far side of where the roof had been. There was a calm about the place that was comforting and reassuring; the walls themselves seemed to be warm and freshly washed in the diffused sunlight, which cast dark shadows.

With a start, I realized that there was a young black boy on the far side of the window through which I was looking. The boy was staring at me as if he knew me. He wore a dark brown shirt, and his arms were crossed. He was perhaps ten years old.

"Hey kid," I asked, "what is this thing?

He spoke quickly and sharply. "It's the Chapel of Ease, where the planters used to go when they didn't have time to get all the way into town for the church there. They'd just come here and sit, because they didn't have a minister or nothing. They let it go after the war, 'cause the white people stopped goin' to church."

The boy spoke without the trace of Gullah which lingered in the voices of many of the blacks in the area. I walked around through the open end of the chapel to see the boy, who turned only slightly as I approached.

"Hey, I'm sort of new around here," I said, reaching out my hand, "I'm Buddy Trigg."

The boy stepped forward with a curious look. He examined my face, then looked at my hands, then looked back up before speaking. "I'm Whit Trigg."

As the child said his name, he turned his head, and I saw it: the thatch of white hair emerging from the boy's temple, a mirror of my own. I touched it with my fingertips, and it was real.