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eagles and the
    men who came so late to it. I believe that. I do.
    It was out into all this that we took Clay Venable,
    my grandfather Aubrey and I, on a July afternoon in
    1972, and none of us came back unchanged. You often
    don’t, in the Lowcountry.
    Alligator Alley is a straight stretch of Wappinaw Creek,
    one of the secret black-water creeks and inlets that cut
    the island like watersnakes. From my grandfather’s
    dock you could reach it, in the Whaler, in a few
    minutes. In the canoe, however, it took about a half
    hour, and we passed that in near silence, broken only
    by the slapping of hands on mosquito-bitten flesh.
    They were mostly Clay Venable’s hands, and his flesh.
    I had slathered myself with Cutter’s before I left the
    house, and my grandfather, for some reason, never
    seemed to be bitten. Finally, after watching Clay endure
    the ordeal in silence, I relented, and reached into my
    pocket and brought out the tube of repellent, and
    passed it up to him. I sat in the rear of the big canoe,
    and my grandfather in front. Clay was our middleman.
    He took the ointment from me and turned and gave
    me a level, serious look from the pale blue eyes.
    “I forgot I had it,” I found myself saying

    Low Country / 63
    defensively, and felt myself flush red. I would be all
    right, I thought, as long as I did not get the full bore
    of those eyes.
    Clay still did not speak, but I noticed that his head
    was always in slight motion, turning this way and that,
    as he looked at everything we passed. An osprey took
    off from a nest on a dead bald cypress at the edge of
    the creek and Clay tracked it. An anhinga dropped
    from a low-lying limb of a live oak when we turned
    from a broader stretch of creek into Alligator Alley and
    he noted it. He marked and measured a turtle sunning
    on a reed-grown bank; the flash of a whitetail far off
    in a lightly forested hummock; the brilliant green ex-
    plosions of cinnamon and resurrection ferns; the vast,
    rippling green seas of cordgrass and the great,
    primeval towers of the bald cypresses, dwarfing all
    else. I had the notion that he was somehow photo-
    graphing all of it, so that he would never lose it, but
    could replay it at will on the screen of his mind
    whenever he chose.
    I learned later that this was not far from true.
    Something within him, some sort of infinite receptacle,
    must fix, store, catalogue, file away. It was my first
    experience of his disconcerting, now-legendary intens-
    ity. When he brought it into play, it precluded whimsy,
    idleness, pensiveness, even the sort of comfortable,
    unfocused dreaminess in which I and most other
    people pass a good deal of our time. He can suspend
    this thing, whatever

    64 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    it is, when he wants and needs to, and often does, but
    I know by now that it costs him something; that the
    effort is to drift on the moment, not to focus and record
    it, as it is with most of us. That, of course, accounted
    for the impact of those extraordinary eyes, and the
    force of the smile was the sheer relief and exuberance
    you felt when he freed you of it. The smile was his gift
    to you. All this I saw in one great leap that afternoon,
    from watching the back of Clay Venable’s head. The
    knowledge did not sit comfortably on my heart.
    The banks rise higher along Alligator Alley, as flat
    on top as manmade dams, overgrown with reeds and
    slicked with mud. Over them, far away, you can see
    the tops of the upland forests, but in the near and
    middle distance there is nothing but reeds and sky and
    creekbanks. Stumps and broken logs punctuate the
    reeds and grasses on the banks and in the edge of the
    black water, and more stumps protrude from the water
    at intervals. It looks for all the world as if heavy logging
    had gone on along this creek. It is not a particularly
    beautiful or interesting stretch of water, and the sun
    beats relentlessly onto the tops of heads and shoulders,
    and if you are in a canoe, your shoulder muscles