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Lovers of hurricanes.

Article Excerpt
All summer Constantine watched the corn grow. Viewed from the deck of the cabin, which lay between the river and the field, it looked much like a green sea, especially when the wind moved across the stalks, making a sound like his favorite trout stream. Because it was being irrigated with water drawn from the river, it grew tall and rich and green in the midst of a rainless summer. The rattle of the pump and the pulse of the giant sprinklers had become as much a part of the sounds of summer as the cicadas in the live oaks or the cooing of the nesting mourning doves in the evening. Now it was late September and the corn was ready to be harvested.

This part of South Carolina, the beginning of the low country some sixty miles from the sea, had been caught in the grip of a drought for several years, so that some people had begun to hope a hurricane would again come this way. There was still downed timber in the woods from where the last one had moved through, but the terror and misery brought by the storm had been forgotten, replaced by the need for water. People were losing their land to the drought.

Last summer when he and his wife, Clarissa, made love on the screened porch a breeze would sometimes catch up the water from one of the sprinklers and carry it against the screen to fall as a fine mist on their sweat-covered bodies. But it did not smell like rain. There was the scent of rubber and the taste of metal in the water.

Clarissa died in August of breast cancer, three years after she had undergone a double mastectomy. He discovered living as he had lived before was impossible. He went to work every day at his land surveying business and came home at night to an empty house. One day as he was standing in a soybean field making a calculation, he realized this sort of work was not going to save him from the despair that was becoming an all-too-familiar companion.

So six months after Clarissa's death he shut down his land surveying business to become a wildlife photographer, something he had wanted to do ever since he had taken a photography course in college. To give himself money to live on he had sold the house and the attached farmland to a retired banker from New Hampshire.

The house, marked by its twin brick chimneys, lay beyond the slough that bordered the eastern end of the cornfield. The house had been built by one of his ancestors, the earliest settler in the county, on land only slightly higher than the slough. It was protected from flooding by a system of private levees.

He converted the land surveying office into a studio and went to live at the cabin. Built as a hunting shack not long after the Civil War, it had been rebuilt a number of times after the river flooded and carried it away. But the pilings he set it on fifteen years before, after it was washed away by high water, were tall enough to keep it out of reach of the river, which would simply spread out across the field after it had reached a certain level. The pilings lifted the cabin above the tops of small trees like dogwoods and redbuds and placed it among the second story of the live oaks and gums. He liked the feeling. It was as if he were in a tree house.

Clarissa had never been fond of the cabin, visiting it only a few times in their long marriage. It was not filled with memories of her as the house had been. He knew he would always have her in his mind, but now that he had changed the direction of his life he thought her death was a loss he could more easily accept. Yet he still sometimes expected to wake up in the morning and find her in bed with him, even in the cabin where she had spent the night only twice.

He devoted his time to roaming the land along...

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