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on the higher ground behind and to the north of the house, where on other days there was only broom sedge and scrubby low trees and brush and ditches, all rimmed with the dark, encroaching forest. Quail land, Emily had come to think of it. A garden more beautiful than anything Emily had ever seen in a book surrounded the house: roses, daylilies, iris, azaleas, camellias, annuals in a riot of improbable colors; velvety, perfectly trimmed boxwood hedges. Off in the marsh and on the hummocks, live oaks spilled curtains of silvery moss onto the high grass, and resurrection ferns burned primal green. At the marshes’ edges the spartina danced in a light wind that smelled so densely of the clean, fishy river and the sea far beyond it that you could get drunk on it. A hundred bird songs haunted the shimmering air. Over it all arched the great tender, washed-blue skies of spring.
    Emily felt drunk—drunk with happiness and a sense of safety and cherishing, drunk with sheer possibility. She found that she could move the mist by leaning this way or that, and she sent herself sailing placidly down to the river, which danced and shone like spilled mercury.
    From above the wooden walkway and dock, which stretched far over the marsh out to where the river ran swift and deep, she heard music, and she saw people and animals and boats. The boats made a long line from the dock back practically to the great turn into Toogoodoo Creek. Beyond the turn you would need only to drift past Bears Bluff to be in the great North Edisto, which ran directly into the open Atlantic between Edisto and Seabrook Islands. The boats were beautiful, towering three-masted schooners with their sails furled, wallowing gently on the morning tide. Their decks were crowded with people she could not see clearly. None of this surprised Emily. The boats were stitched unalterably into the fabric of the day.
    The music came at her in bursts and sweeps: a skirl of Pachelbel, a ribbon of Bach—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” she thought; Buddy had loved it—a joyous, rhythmic shout of song rising over strange old drums and tambourines, surely a Gullah praise song; a thread of the Shirelles singing “Foolish Little Girl,” Carolina beach music at its best; a soaring snatch of the Fifth Dimension singing “The Age of Aquarius”—who was it who had loved that song? Emily could not remember, but the song made glee rise and catch in her throat. The music was not incongruous. Emily thought how empty this magical air would be without it.
    The people who stood on the dock beside the first ship, unlike those on the boat’s deck, were as clear as if they had been outlined in light. There was her father, his tanned face lifted to the sun, laughing. Aunt Jenny stood beside him, dressed in something long and flowery, its skirts and her unbound hair blowing in the wind. She was smiling up at Walter Parmenter. The twins were there, in their beloved, disreputable old camouflage hunting clothes, grinning and shoving each other amiably. Behind them, alone in a wagging, grinning turmoil of beautiful, red-burning Boykins, stood Buddy.
    Emily could hardly suppress a shout of joy, but she knew in the dream that to speak would rupture it. Buddy stood tall and lanky, taller than anyone else on the deck, hands in the pockets of madras walking shorts, a blue oxford cloth shirt rolled up over his brown wrists and arms. He had sunglasses pushed up into the thick dark blond hair that was his father’s, and every now and then he reached a sockless boat shoe out to tap a fractious spaniel. Emily knew she was seeing Buddy not as he had been, but as he might have been if he had lived to college age. He had wanted to study poetry and drama at Yale.
    A ship’s long hoot sounded, and the jib on the leading schooner spilled out into the air and caught the little wind. The people on the dock all smiled up at her and filed aboard. They stood staring out over the bow, watching the swirl of the water.