Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

looking at us all on the beach or in the sea or before the fire, listening to us walking and laughing, listening even harder to what we did not say, I thought that perhaps they felt it, too, a little; that this place and its dwellers might truly be the reality, and all the rest its shadow. That in some atavistic way it was home, and we were family. I know that I felt that way all the years that we were together.
    We few were a multitude.

    When I think of the second summer I went to the beach house, I think of dogs and light.
    There seemed to be dogs everywhere that year: on the beach; in the surf; bumping along with their owners in golf carts toward the little cluster of shops at the foot of the bridge; lolling in patches of shade under porches and cars; trotting in amiable phalanxes along Middle Street, noses searching the weedy roadsides for who knows what. They ran heavily to pointers and setters, working dogs for the many hunters who summered on the island, and small, scruffy, happy-looking mutts. The days of the glut of labs and goldens was still in the future.
    We had our own tribe at the beach house. Charlie’s two Boykin spaniels, Boy and Girl, came almost every time the Currys did, and spent a great deal of time sleeping on the porch and eating whatever they could beg. They got plenty. All of us spoiled the dogs.
    “Best hunting dogs in the world,” Charlie said fondly. “They’re legendary. Mouths as soft as velvet. They’ve never messed up a single duck.”
    “That’s because they’ve never retrieved a single duck,” Lewis said lazily, from the hammock. “Charlie hates hunting. These are two of the most expensive lap dogs in Charleston.”
    “Well, if I hunted them they’d be the best,” Charlie said, grinning. It was almost impossible to annoy or anger him. He remains one of the most amiable men I ever knew.
    “They are sweet, but they poop more than any other dogs I’ve ever seen,” Camilla said. “I never go anywhere without my scoop and my Baggies.”
    And that was true. It was Camilla who took the dogs on long daily walks down the beach. Her tall, slightly stooped figure and the manic dogs became a fixed thread in the tapestry of that summer. The dogs would careen crazily from the dunes to the surf and back, sniffing for crabs and turtle-egg holes. Camilla’s chestnut hair blew back in the wind, and sometimes you could see her lips moving, talking to the dogs. She bent frequently to scoop the prodigious poop. Often she went out of sight past where the beach curved, far to the east. Occasionally she stayed gone for hours. We did not worry about her. She would come back eventually, still serene, her hair tangled, fresh pink glowing on her wonderful cheekbones. The panting dogs would collapse on the porch.
    “You don’t want to run them too far,” Charlie said once, earnestly, and the rest of us burst into laughter. The idea of Camilla Curry running a couple of legendary hunting dogs to exhaustion was ludicrous. Sometimes she walked the beach without the dogs, and came back much later carrying shells in her cupped hands. She never seemed to want company, and we did not ask to go along. Camilla moved in a bubble of privacy.
    Henry’s springer spaniel, Gladys, came, too. Gladys lived summers at the old McKenzie island house, over on the inland waterway. Fairlie and Henry’s daughter, Nancy, often brought her brood out to the house for the summer, and when she did not, Henry’s handyman lived on the place and took care of Gladys. Gladys, Fairlie said, loved Leroy far more than she did Henry, but when she was with us at the beach house, Gladys stuck to Henry in an ecstasy of love. She was a pretty thing, and Simms said she was one of the best dove dogs he’d ever seen.
    “I’ve been trying to get Henry to breed her so I can have a pup, but he wants her to stay a virgin. He sure knows how to show a girl a good time.”
    “Gladys is above matters of the flesh,” Henry said from under the