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good old country stock. What he means is
    white trash. Hillbilly. She is nearly six feet tall, walks
    like she is plowing a mule, has shoulders as wide as a
    linebacker’s and dishwater-blond hair chopped impa-
    tiently so that it will not hang in her eyes. Her skin is
    permanently the red-brown of old cordovan shoes,
    from the sun. Her voice is nasal and flat, her eyes are
    the faded blue of old denim, and her hands are the size
    and shape of coal scuttles. She is also an artist of
    stunning originality and talent. Her enormous, flaming
    primitive oils hang in galleries and museums all up
    and down the East Coast. Her strange, soaring iron
    sculptures are in collections all over America. She gets
    upwards of fifteen thousand dollars for her small
    paintings and I don’t even know how much for the
    larger ones. She works so slowly that she rarely does
    more than three or four pieces a year, will not accept
    commissions, and still lives in the ramshackle former
    filling sta

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    tion that she moved into thirty years ago, on an undis-
    tinguished two-lane blacktop road that threads the
    middle of the island. My grandfather, who was in-
    trigued with her gift and her grit, rented it to her some
    years before he deeded the island to Clay and stipulated
    that she be allowed to live there as long as she liked.
    Clay thinks that she was more to my grandfather than
    tenant, though she was only twenty when she first
    came to the island, and he may be right. Lottie sleeps
    with whomever she pleases and does not try to conceal
    the fact, though with no one from the Plantation, that
    I know of. Her gentlemen callers all seem to be from
    off-island, to judge from the tags on their automobiles.
    She built her studio herself, from random ends of
    lumber, and it looks like a chicken house on the outside
    and is glorious inside with light and space. When I
    asked her, when we first met, why she chose Peacock’s
    Island, she said, “The light,” and I knew what she
    meant. I soon found that I usually did, about
    everything. She is my best friend. Clay cannot stand
    her, nor she him. Both of them have finally worked
    around to a point where they simply do not discuss
    the other anymore.
    But there are other ways of showing enmity, and
    Lottie’s disgusted snorts and Clay’s still, cold silences
    get their messages across. I know he thinks she is
    sluttish, slovenly, an eyesore in Eden, and worst of all
    in his primer of sins, lazy. He is

    44 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    probably right on all counts. She thinks he is cold,
    calculating, far fonder of money than me, and worst
    of all in her primer, a despoiler of the wild. I never
    thought of Clay as any of those things, not the Clay I
    met and fell in love with and married. But so many of
    the things I never thought have come about, and so
    many that I did think have failed to do so, that I
    sometimes trust my own judgment last after anyone
    else’s. It’s easier to think Lottie is wrong about Clay,
    though I have to admit that she has seldom been about
    other things.
    But we all have our blind spots, don’t we? Oh, yes,
    we do. And I figure Clay is hers. Just as he is mine.
    Lord, the day I first met him! He will never seem
    more beautiful, more whole, more hypnotically
    charming than he did on the day his friend Hayes
    Howland brought him over to the island to meet my
    grandfather. Poor Clay; he would hate that if I told
    him, hate that in my mind, he reached his ascendancy
    before I even knew him well. But I never have told
    him, and I never will.
    It was in July, just at dusk. It had been a strange,
    unsettled day of running cloud shadow; little winds
    that started up and doubled back upon themselves and
    then died; sudden warm, hard spatters of rain that left
    the earth and air steaming and shimmering. Later we
    would surely have a storm. I was visiting from Colum-
    bia,

    Low Country / 45
    where we had just moved, and had brought my water-
    colors and easel with me and