Road to Folly. Leslie Ford
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work and make the land work when anything will grow on it. Just look at it!”
She waved her hand at the teeming sub-tropical growth on both sides of us, stretching forward and back as far as we could see.
“Other people are doing it. It’s just because we’re too lazy and too spoiled and unintelligent! It’s wrong, I tell you, to waste it. If it were barren and poor, it wouldn’t be . . . but it isn’t, it’s marvellous!”
She stopped abruptly. We’d come to the narrow stone bridge on St. Swithin’s Creek that divides the broad tract of land that comprises the two plantations, Darien and Strawberry Hill, on the Ashley in St. Swithin’s Parish, before you come to Church Creek and St. Andrew’s in St. Andrew’s Parish. The whole grant had originally been Darien, but it had been divided, Phyllis had told me once, by Miss Caroline’s great-grandfather in 1760 and the smaller plantation given to a widowed daughter who called it Strawberry Hill. It had descended with Darien itself to Miss Caroline’s father, who’d left them both to her, his eldest unmarried daughter. As they’d always been in the same family, they’d always kept the single entrance through a fifty-yard double lane of old moss-draped magnolias until it crossed a narrow inlet. It divided then into a wide “V” down two long avenues of live oaks to Darien on the left and Strawberry Hill on the right. We turned in, Jennifer and I, through the old mauve brick pillars, newly painted, with their great carved stone acorn capitals painted fresh clean white, and the elaborate iron gates new shining black, and crossed the bridge.
The avenue to the left was swept sandy-smooth and leafless, its wide grass borders under the moss-hung oaks trimmed and immaculate. A small white shield at its entrance said “DARIEN.” The avenue on the right was blocked with a weather-beaten rail gate in the old crumbling brick wall overgrown with yellow jasmine and tangled creeper. I’d seen it many times, of course, from this end, but I’d forgotten about it. And what a wilderness it was—all overhung with moss and flowers so sweet the sense faints picturing them. Was it Shelley who said that? It was true of all this.
Jennifer unlocked the padlock and opened the gate. I drove the car in and stopped while she closed the gate again and came back and took the wheel. Her firm little jaw set. The contrast of Phyllis’s avenue into Darien and this one into Strawberry Hill made her struggle to keep it so hopelessly tragic. She said nothing however. It wasn’t the traditional Southern lady acting as if the fried fatback were the turkey stuffed with capon stuffed with duck stuffed with doves sort of thing. It was much more human . . . I’d asked for it, and I was getting it, and I could take it and like it.
4
Ahead of us for half a mile stretched an overgrown cavern of live oaks hung with cascades of pale wisteria and thick festoons of grey moss that were more shadow than substance in the low slanting planes of the evening sunlight through the young-leafed branches. Somebody had said the live oak avenues were like cathedral naves. This one wasn’t—it was too impeded with magnolias and holly and snowy dogwood and cassina that had seeded themselves among the old trees and stretched up, seeking the sun. But the grey moss and purple wisteria, and the whole glow and loom were very like the clouds of incense from the high altar of Chartres, with the amethystine lights round it making planes as tangible and solid in the darkened aisles as these planes were intangible and ethereal. The broad aisle itself was overgrown with lush green grass, and where the water had settled in the ruts there were tiny iris and white violets. And it was silent . . . so silent you could hear the wind whispering softly in the pine-tops beyond the oaks, like the insistent murmur of long dead voices.
Jennifer put her foot abruptly on the gas. The engine whirred. Half way along the avenue the white tail of a doe flashed, and then another, and another. Still she didn’t speak, as we rattled over the bumpy road that was scarcely a road as much as narrow tracks across an overgrown lawn. And then, under the pale mauve canopy of moss and light and wisteria with its arabesque of waxy dogwood, I saw the six slender columns of the portico of Strawberry Hill.
As we came closer the silence came again, so profound that it drowned the cough of the engine and made it impudent and easy to ignore. I glanced back. The avenue closed in, opaque and shadowy as a column of amethyst quartz behind us. Jennifer stopped the car in a drive that would have been scarcely definable if it hadn’t been for the marble pedestal that marked the center of it. On the pedestal were two exquisitely lovely marble feet, the heel of one raised just a little, as if a nymph had poised a moment, and two fragile ankles, and nothing else.
Jennifer’s eyes followed mine.
“The war,” she said briefly. “But they didn’t burn the house, or loot it either.”
She looked at me with a little frown, as if she were remembering something. But it passed quickly and she got out of the car.
I stood for a moment on my side, looking up at the slender columns of the portico. This house was dead. The four deep windows on either side of the broad front door were barred and shuttered. The door itself looked as if it had never opened. The steps up to it had rotted at the ends, the graceful wrought-iron balcony over it sagged a little. The narrow palladian window with a bunch of strawberries carved in the key over the center arch was shuttered on the inside. The three broad windows upstairs on either side of it were shuttered too.
For a moment we both stood there. My heart throbbed against my ribs. It was so desolate and blind and tragic, someway, with an eerie silence stretching from the tomb of years. I looked at Jennifer. She was looking me squarely in the eyes, and yet way past my eyes, deep inside me—tragic herself, but very young, and with the kind of defences that only the young trust in.
I heard my voice, quite loud because there were no other sounds, say,
“I think I’d rather go back, Jennifer.”
I don’t know now why I said it. I’m sure I never intended to. It was almost as if I already knew the secret of that old blind house . . . the secret this child had tried so desperately to guard.
She shook her head.
“I didn’t want you to come, but you’re here now. You can’t go back . . . not now. Shall we go in?”
Her voice was perfectly calm, but I saw the corners of her mouth tremble. I followed her up the steps. She unlocked the broad dingy-white door with a big iron key and pushed it open. It was cold inside, cold and damp. I stepped over the threshold. My foot on the side cypress boards, scrubbed clean but not polished, sounded loud and hollow. Jennifer closed the door quickly behind her and drew the bolt. The hall was wide, and even darker than I’d known it would be. The only light was from another palladian window where the delicate sweeping staircase made a balcony across the other end. The door under the stair balcony was closed, an iron bar fastened securely across it. In the dim light from the upstairs window I could see the bold simple cornice and panelling—dingy and split in some places but very fine—and four handsome doors, two on either side with a carved urn of strawberry leaves and blossoms and fruit between the curling rosettes of their broken pediments. It was a fine interior, not as overelaborated as many Low Country houses but bold and masculine . . . not of the diddling Adam that was so popular in Carolina. I glanced quickly at the furniture in it, and saw what Phyllis meant. It was quite perfect. The Chippendale console table with reeded legs, the tarnished girandole above it, the Sheffield urn full of camellias in the center . . . and one of the set of ribband backed Chippendale chairs beside it. I didn’t blame Phyllis for wanting it or even for trying to get it, actually. Or the Sheraton sofa against the opposite wall with the relief of rice sheaves carved on the back. Or the Sully portrait hanging over it. Or the Aubusson rug with its trailing border of strawberries that must, I realized, have been woven especially for that space.
Jennifer pulled off her hat and tossed it with her car keys on a Chippendale chair beside the table. “If you’ll sit down a moment, I’ll see if my aunt is awake,” she said evenly. I walked across the hall and sat down in the sofa, something vaguely disturbing nagging in the back of my mind. Jennifer went quickly along the hall, and ran lightly up the stairs. I heard the rapid tattoo of her heels deaden and disappear.
I glanced at the closed doors into the shuttered rooms, and got up.