“Not good,” she surmised.
He shook his head. “You’ve got a rotten sill.”
“Just tell me how much it’s going to cost.”
“If it’s gone, a fair amount,” he said, standing up again. “They’ll have to jack this bad boy up and—”
Hearing him begin to wax enthusiastic, she held a hand up like a cop. “Stop. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“The core may still be solid, though,” he repented. “I’ll check it when there’s better light.”
“Well, unless the house is going to fall down on our heads,” she said, starting off, “it’s going to have to wait until I start my job.”
“Maybe not…”
She turned.
“I left something for you inside on the table.”
Her stare interrogated him, but Ransom, under pressure, didn’t break. “I guess I’ll see about that grill.”
In the first whoosh of exploding fire as Ransom tossed the match, he saw an ant, a large black one, crawling across a pale expanse of trodden clay. Dancing from the Weber’s cauldron, the tall blue flames revealed another, and another, a whole line marching across the lawn, flanked by their distorted, much larger shadows. Following them in the direction of the graveyard, Ransom, halfway there, came to a patch of old-growth periwinkle, where the tiny regiment vanished into cover. With the insole of his boot, he brushed the greenery aside. The earth within had been milled into friable red grains, the telltale sign. Trying to ascertain the colony’s extent, he waded deeper. The ground turned spongy underfoot. Feeling his way gingerly, his boot struck something solid, upright, like a stob. Squatting on his hams, Ran swept aside the leaves and looked. Protruding from the ground was what appeared at first to be a nub of upthrust tree root, possibly a surveyor’s pin. In the failing light, it was impossible to make it out. Touching it, he felt a shock. “Shit! The damn thing’s hot!” he said, reverting to old habits from the cab.
As he rubbed his hand and looked, Ran noticed smoke rising from the ground around him, a thin, subtle cloud, drifting over the periwinkle in the direction of the river. Suddenly, a boat horn blew.
“What the hell…” Startled, he fell over on his seat.
At that moment, he heard the fluttering of wings and looked up to see a flock of birds passing up where afternoon preserved a late, last note of blue. Wheeling in dark formation, they threw their shadow earthward as they went, creating the illusion. Trying to make out what they were, Ran watched them drift eastward in a twittering green cloud. Shelving his eyes, he stared toward the river, waiting for the boat to come around the bend. A beat passed. Then another. Ransom, as he waited, could feel his heartbeat pounding out a heavy klaxon in his chest.
THREE
In the Nina’s bows, Addie, with the breeze of the boat’s headway blowing her loose hair, watches six black oarsmen in a lighter off the starboard side put their backs into the strokes, redoubling their efforts as the little steamer overtakes them.
“Look, Aunt Blanche, they’re racing us—isn’t it lovely!” She points with the hand that holds her book—a new edition of Byron, in red morocco, picked up at Russell’s for the trip. In the excitement, she has yet to cut the pages….
Last evening, as they crossed the bar at Charleston, the Niagara fired across the bow, and all night long, as the crew tumbled casks and bales into the sea, the big Federal frigate gave chase—so close at times, Addie could hear the creaking of the warship’s masts. Today, just at dawn, the Nina slipped, safe, into Winyah Bay.
Addie barely closed her eyes, and her first encounter with the Pee Dee has ravished her so wholly that her beloved Byron has received short shrift.
“Oh, and listen…Listen, Aunt Blanche.” Now she holds a finger up.
Above the engine and the rush of wind, the song drifts up:
In case I never see you anymo’
I hope to meet on Canaan’s happy sho’….
Addie’s eyes, which are blue and mobile, showing every change of mood or thought, film with happiness as she looks at her aunt, who stands holding downher bonnet, under stress from the dazzle of sunlight on black water, from the fresh, raw wind.
“Yes, dear, but sparks…The smoke is blowing toward us.” Blanche eyes the imported silk of Addie’s dress regretfully. From Mrs. Cummings’s shop on Meeting Street, the centerpiece of the trousseau, it is pale blue to match her niece’s eyes, with darker horizontal stripes to bring them out, a style called bayadere, all the rage this winter past, the gayest social season anybody can remember, with a Secession ball or supper every week, a Secession something somewhere every night. “And your hair, Addie…Please come in before we have to hire a team of mules and drag a hay rake through your hair.”
“Do I look a fright?” she asks, laughing as she touches it. “I’m sure I must. But, oh, Aunt Blanche, I feel happy. Have you ever seen such a sky? If you struck it with a mallet, it looks as though it just might ring. And, look, the birds!” she cries now, pointing, as a sudden flock swoops down. “They’re racing, too! What are they? Are they the ones that Nellie makes?”
“No, dear, those are bobolinks,” Blanche answers. “These are green. I don’t know what they are.”
“Maybe it’s an omen!”
“A good one, let us pray.”
“I’m sure it is,” says the new bride. “Seeing this, I feel it will all come right. It must. It simply shall, Aunt Blanche.”
“I hope so, dear,” says Blanche, with notably less enthusiasm than her niece. “Though I can’t speak from personal experience, Addie, I’ve seen many marriages that start in passion come to bad results, while those built on prudence and good sense endure and thrive. Though Harlan isn’t whom I would have chosen for you once upon a time, you and he are well matched in several ways.”
“You’re
