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bank and into the water in an eye
    flicker. I have seen that. I usually hold my breath until
    we are past them.
    We almost were when one of the submerged logs
    in the water began to move, to glide lazily after the
    canoe. I drew in my breath and did not let it out again.
    My grandfather looked back at Clay and me and shook
    his head almost imperceptibly. I knew that he meant
    us to be still and silent. The alligator did not lift its
    head, but the eyes followed us, closing on the canoe,
    and my grandfather kept up his steady, leisurely pad

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    dling. I followed suit, but my shoulder muscles cried
    out to dig in, to paddle faster, to stroke with all my
    might. I did not look to the right or left, except once,
    and then I could see the gator’s head almost abreast
    of me in the rear of the canoe. I looked back slightly
    farther. Just under the sun-dappled surface of the water
    I could see its body. It seemed, in the shifting green-
    blackness, to go on forever. It was like looking down
    into a bright summer sea and seeing, under its glittering
    surface, the long, dark, death’s shape of a submarine,
    ghosting silently beside you. I shut my eyes and
    paddled.
    After what seemed an eternity my grandfather said,
    in his normal voice, “I heard there was a big one
    around this year. Shem Cutler saw him early one
    morning, taking a raccoon. Said he looked like a
    damned dinosaur. Shem reckoned he might be eighteen
    or twenty feet. I hear they’ve been losing pigs and a
    hound or two over at Dayclear, too. I wouldn’t be
    surprised if it ain’t old Levi.”
    “Levi?” I croaked, finally looking back. The gator
    had apparently lost interest in us and turned toward
    the bank. He did not come out of the water, though.
    In another stroke or two we were past the convocation
    of gators.
    “The Gullahs tell about a giant alligator that’s always
    been around these parts, bigger than any of the others
    by a country mile. They

    Low Country / 69
    say you can hear him bellowing in the nights as far as
    Edisto. Every time a piglet or a dog or a chicken goes
    missing, they say that it’s Levi. Nobody much sees him
    and they say you can’t catch him. Gators do live to be
    right old, but if the tales are true, this old boy would
    be near about two hundred years old. If that was Levi,
    you kids have got something to tell your grandchildren.
    Figuratively speaking, of course.”
    And he grinned at Clay and me. I felt the red flood
    into my face again.
    “Can all that be true?” Clay said with great interest.
    “Naw, I don’t reckon so,” my grandfather said. “Be
    something for Ripley if it was. All the same, the old
    tales don’t die out. And that was one big mother of a
    gator. You just don’t ever know, in the Lowcountry.”
    I felt something on the back of my neck that was like
    a cold little wind under the heavy sun.
    “Who named him Levi?” I said.
    “I’ve always heard that one of the first preachers at
    the little pray house in Dayclear did, after he was
    supposed to have gone off with three children in one
    year. It’s short for Leviathan.”
    I felt the little wind again, stronger this time.
    “God, that’s marvelous,” Clay breathed. “That’s just
    marvelous.”
    He looked back, his face rapt and blinded. I thought
    at first he was looking at me, but then I

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    saw that he was looking past me to the big gator as it
    lay submerged, just off the receding bank behind us.
    My skin prickled.
    “Marvelous isn’t exactly the term I would have used,”
    I said.
    But, “I reckon that’s just what it is, Clay,” my
    grandfather said, and I felt obscurely rebuffed.
    We got back to the dock just as the sun was disap-
    pearing in a conflagration of rose red across the forest
    on the mainland to the west. The water of the creek
    was dappled red and gold, and the sweet, damp
    thickness that twilight brought seemed to drop down
    over us like a shawl. I have always felt