Low Country Read online

  To Nana & Grandpa

  Contents

  ______________________

  1. While I Breathe, I Hope

  2. Treasure Maps

  3. Horse Thieves & Millionaires

  4. Golden Gloves

  5. Waccamaw Academy

  6. The Ferry or the Road?

  7. Aces over Eights

  8. Four of a Kind

  9. Whiskey Jones

  10. Hurricane Games

  11. The Suckers List

  12. The Gray Man

  13. Nana’s House

  Acknowledgments

  1

  _________

  While I Breathe, I Hope

  ONCE DOWN IN THE LOW COUNTRY, I SAW THE ghost of a woman I knew well. Not the cool silver specters observed by men that portend danger and violent endings, but a beauty who basked in wide strands of sunshine and predicted nothing but herself. She walked slowly along the shore as if taking in the clear winter sky and soothing song of low-tide surf on the beach that connects the boardwalk with Ocean Boulevard on one side and with the Atlantic on the other. It was the first day of a new year. An easy time to get lost in the portal crease between calendar pages, or any pages, really. Ours is a tourist town alive only half the year at most, and who is to say that spirits do not need a vacation every now and then like the rest of us? She did not see me as she had in life, and I froze breathless, unable to move for equal fear of her attention and her vanishing. I watched this figure as she strolled and smiled, a seductive curving form that might pass for the lolling dunes behind us or the sprawl of waves beyond. She looked in her white pleated shorts and pink bikini top like any other visitor in search of something from our beach to take home. Wherever that might be these days. While I breathe, I hope, says our humble state motto, but surely there is hope for the ghosts of South Carolina too.

  I have seen a few such unbelievable occurrences and have heard of many more. Across inlets tinted the lavender gray of looming afternoon storm clouds and marshes fringed green and gold with reedy spartina grass, this coast has entertained the most distinguished of pirates and every sort of sea monster, from mermaids and megalodons to slave ships and surging tempests. Now the history is hidden beneath the plastic indignities of scratchy Astroturf and fiberglass minotaurs that invite tourists to play miles of miniature golf courses, for which the city of Myrtle Beach is distinguished as the world’s capital. A selection of historical dinner theater that is awfully forgetful caters to out-of-towners with inelegant accents who come for tans and leave with tattoos. A coast is fundamentally a liminal space, I suppose.

  Our family has made its living off the stories and legends of the Low Country since long before my lifetime. With my brothers and cousins, all sons of sons except for me, I have searched for buried treasure rumored to have been hidden by the pirate Blackbeard under this looking-glass sand. When we did not find it there, we dug up the briny slime of pluff mud at low tide and stalked the pines at the edges of the family’s golf courses looking for relics of our history. Under bedsheet tents printed with dinosaurs and aglow in candlelight, my dad and his brother, Uncle Leslie, brought to life sunken galleons, crumbled plantations, and cemeteries haunted by the eternally unfulfilled souls of lonely wives and lovelorn daughters carried away by sea or sickness. Vengeful spirit remains among the main opportunities for ambitious women in the Low Country, and I took note as the boys took cover.

  I know several God-fearing folks who claim to have seen with their own eyes the Gray Man pacing the beaches of Pawley’s Island before hurricanes Hugo and Hazel. Some will say they’ve seen him before the lesser unnamed storms of recent years, though any kid here can tell you that is not how it works. If the laws are few and far between in South Carolina, the rules that govern our folklore are kept strict, and any ghost worth her salt respects such soundness. So you see, even as the law has little place here, a crooked logic carries sway. Like many native sons and daughters, the Gray Man rouses for a hurricane, and it is a stroke of luck to be forewarned of approaching danger by whoever he was. Hold your breath when going past a graveyard, unless you want to breathe in a lost and lingering soul. Hang your empty bottles from tree branches to catch a stray evil eye. Paint your ceilings the calm, cool blue of a late-September sky after an almighty storm to trick the haints from coming out at night. It really is a lovely color. What is tradition if not a truce with the unknown, of which there isn’t as much as there used to be. Good ghost stories have disappeared as fast as decency in these times. Like a full-moon ocean wave or a tree branch in a hurricane, an authentic one will knock you over the side of the head. A sideways glance is the most graceful escape in the direct path of such forces, though it is a discipline to look away.

  I have been gone thirteen years, give or take some superstition. When I return, I tell myself only one story: that this is the last time, and this last time may finally end up as such, if I can look away. My nana, a witty beauty to match any Mitford sister and with more common sense than the bunch, has told me that I talk like a Yankee now. She forgave this ugliness and all the rest. It is only in conversation with her, whose drawl is as deep as her memory, that my own accent creeps out from wherever it lies. Under tongue or heart, depending on mood or drink.

  I come from a line of women for whom being walked all over and jumped on for the fun of cruelty was progress. The ironing out of accent was a way to fool myself into believing that I could be different than those women who suffered to make me. If I could have painted the roof of my mouth that lovely shade of haint blue to scare away the ghosts of women I did not want to be, the women I came from, I would have licked clean the brush. I was supposed to be a boy, declared both a doctor and the family tree. It was impressed upon me that I was wanted however I came out, but I have wondered if this aberration rooted in me from the beginning a sense of indignation and unbelonging. The near-miss is a favorite trick of fate, and I always knew that being a girl meant hurting for what my brothers didn’t realize they had. Remarking upon this or any injustice was considered rude, I learned fast. My unease did not matter, so long as I was seeing to the ease and comfort of those around me. A lesson I hated to see practiced by my nana and mom, but found myself following.

  Nana didn’t keep pear trees or hang trinkets from any ancestral cedar, but an ample magnolia stands skyscraper-tall in her backyard. From the top branches, you can see clear across to the beach and back a few centuries. What is now King’s Highway, still the main road in town, was once the route George Washington took when he visited Long Bay, as Myrtle Beach was known in 1791, and the road was named in typical backward civility for the new republic’s first president. Only once in my lifetime has the tide flirted with the roots of our Great Tree, and no storm has yet knocked it over, so who knows what’s up there. Memories woven between branches alongside the other forgotten junk. Swing ropes and water guns and toy action figures. Children are all born pagans, inspired by season, sin, and blood sacrifice.

  My parents moved us away from Myrtle Beach when I was in high school, and Charlotte, North Carolina, may as well have been New York City. While my childhood classmates became teenage mothers and drug addicts or both, I was sent home from my fancy college prep school, having applied and tested for admittance as my lone act of teenage rebellion, for wearing overalls. I got made fun of for dressing and talking like the hick I was. In a lonely flashlight-lit blanket tent, I read aloud Their Eyes Were Watching God over and over to comfort myself in the more familiar realm of put-upon women who talked in the melodies of my nana, a music that I knew from watching her could cushion the severest of blows. I didn’t say much in school, but when I did, it was always the right answer, delivered in perfect television neutral. I was experienced at ignoring greater meanness. Rising above, as N
ana would say. The name-calling, classroom hair-pulling, being tripped and pushed in hallways. These were small sufferings and worth the tolerating, if this fancy school helped me to escape a fate as vengeful spirit trapped by the stories I knew by heart. A Myrtle Beach education would not get me where I wanted to go, and though I wasn’t sure where that was, I knew that it had to be different and far away.

  More than a decade after graduating from the fancy college prep school, during a time of devastating grief, I saw weekly a young woman who called herself a healer. In a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, the walls adorned with her own trinkets of worship, we discussed why I left a safe and salaried magazine job, how my writing progressed or didn’t, and the things I tried to keep hidden from everyone else I knew. Our sessions were a relief and a terror. I described ghosts I was not sure I had seen and received knowing nods and leading questions that made me feel, for an hour a week, less alone. Were those really the voices of loved ones long gone who called out my name in subway cars and expensive restaurants and while I brushed my teeth? She held her palms an inch over my navel for long periods or pinched my toes following a particular order, as I held cool white stones of differing shapes that were painted in pretty patterns of smiling suns and dreamy-eyed prancing jaguars. She said these stones were from the Andes, and I felt it impolite to press. “There, you see,” she sometimes declared without elaboration after such a performance. More than once, she asked if I knew the tall man with the blue eyes who always stood behind me. One session, she informed me that I had somehow healed all the women I had ever been, as well as all my grandmothers going back to Eve, and I wish that I had asked her how. I began to feel unsettled less by my supernatural company than by her earthside acquaintance. I came to understand what it was I wanted from my own voice and never went back.

  The Joneses built their fortune on worshipping the water, before it was lost worshipping wealth. My education was paid for, in part, by tourists who anointed themselves with suntan oil, who glutted themselves annually on deep-fried seafood at all-you-can-eat buffets, readying their own slippery, cooked limbs for sacrifice. With the right SPF, they think they are safe from all manner of natural forces. They don’t know which ghosts to watch out for, and we, the locals, take advantage of their ignorance, which makes us blasphemers as well as con men, and I’m just fine with both. Come take a ride on the Ferris wheel that spins like a prayer at the edge of the world, the tallest wheel east of the Mississippi. How easy to feel, in these lofty moments, that this life is more real than the tall tales that outlive the memories and outlast the souvenirs. Don’t forget to have some ice cream at Painter’s after.

  I used to think I learned storytelling from my dad. From the country-music songs he wrote and sang all day and the tall tales of the Low Country that he told us each night. On forests’ worth of sunny yellow legal pads, under the sacred porcelain gaze of an Elvis Presley bust looking down from his bookshelf on high, Dad wrote as I sat on the carpet and waited for him to sing and ask, “What do you think, baby?” Between the pirate legends and ghost stories, the fairy tales of my childhood were his verses about bad luck and lonesome women, and I could see the stories become reality in the women I loved but did not want to be like. In the evening hours, my brothers and I filled Mason jars with lightning bugs to keep as night-lights after the candles were blown out so Dad could chase the neon lights of fame, playing low-ceilinged honky-tonks up and down the Carolinas and sometimes into Georgia. When I woke each morning, Dad was always sleeping the deep sleep of whiskey and defeat on the couch with his cowboy boots still on, his guitar in its case by the door, and my lightning bugs upside down with suffocation in the grass at the bottom of their jars. Years later, home from college and about to leave the South for good, I found that Elvis bust in a cabinet. Picking it up for the first time, I saw that it was a bourbon decanter and not a golden calf. That we had been praying to the alcohol all along explained a few things.

  I know now that I was already filled with the stories of women. From my mom, I learned how to live with a broken heart, as she knew from hers. Nothing will wreck a marriage like the horizon. Mom tried to anchor Dad to her in all the usual ways a woman tries. Powdered cheekbones, sea-green eyes done up to glitter, auburn hair scorched into mermaid waves. She dressed the part of a country-music star’s wife before he was half famous. Fringe, sequins, shoulder pads. Sparkles are a sure sign of magic, and I thought she was more beautiful than Dolly Parton in that skintight, hot-pink number from the Dolly show. Any costume suited her figure, which even after a litter of kids and a diet of food-stamp fare, retained the perfect and irresistible curves of a guitar. There’s nothing so attractive as symmetry. I read somewhere that writing a song is like building a house, which I reckon rings true. Our family has lived in a lot of houses over the years. Only one of them burned down, and most of the guitars made it out all right. A little singed is still fine playing shape.

  Dad left us to move to Nashville more than a few times, and he came back every time but one. He spent the 1980s and ’90s trying to sell himself to the executives on Music Row, leaving orphan cassette-tape demos tucked inside wicker baskets on their doorsteps. I began telling my own bedtime stories. From Myrtle Beach, he could afford the trip to Tennessee only once or twice a year. While he worked in the family’s motels and restaurants, he saw his buddies in Nashville wind up with record deals and writing contracts. He finally chose music over us for good, and after decades of being told he’d never make it, he made it big in what they call outlaw country, the inevitable genre for the descendant of bootleggers and gamblers. Dad and I sang Hank Williams songs to each other in the car, and it is Hank Williams Jr. who sings his songs now. I will tell you that it is disorienting to hear a stranger sing about your life on the radio. Even if we once were the people in those verses, radio always beats reality.

  As is Southern tradition, and the premise of most classic country-music duets, my parents separated and reconciled at least a dozen times before and after their divorce. The drinks, the golden rings, and the kids add up to something, but failure pulls on a man’s heart stronger than guilt or love. Once he got to Nashville, he’d given himself the ultimate heartache to sing about. He’d lost his family, and I can’t let alone the wondering: Do we have our stories because of the songs? If Dad were not a country-music singer, would there have been all the drinking and the cheating? The violence and the making up? At least the bills might have been paid on time. The South does not own tragedy, but it sure seems to have taken a liking to the region. And why not? The climate’s pleasant, and the folks are nice enough to your face. There’s an ice machine down the hallway beside the elevator, and pet hermit crabs are ninety-nine cents apiece when you buy a beach towel. I had one I called Periwinkle, and she lived for years in a plastic aquarium filled with little rocks the same synthetic cerulean blue of the water falling from fiberglass rocks at every single mini-golf course. It’s true nobody minds her own business, but why would you want to keep quiet when gossip comes with a fat slice of pound cake and a blessing offered to offending hearts.

  We’ll start with a story about Uncle Jack, because when the mythology’s run as dry as the county used to be, there’s always one more story about my great-uncle Jack. In 1985, four years before Hurricane Hugo and with three kids under three, my parents moved to Conway, South Carolina, barely inland from Myrtle Beach. Dad was driving to Murrells Inlet to tend bar for the night at Drunken Jack’s, named for a different Jack, whom we will get to in due time. He’s cruising down Highway 544 in his beat-up pickup truck, the one Hank Williams Jr. sings about getting repossessed on the radio. Just about to the old-fashioned turn-bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, where the riverboat casino docks, a white Cadillac appears in his rearview mirror, getting closer and closer until the headlights disappear into his bumper, and he is run off the road. In a cloud of dust and mosquitos—so mad he doesn’t even bother to check for water moccasins, as he taught us to do so close to the water—Dad jumps ou
t of the car with more than cussing on his mind. “What in the hell do you think you’re doin’?” he starts to yell. You see, he knows the car and its driver. His uncle, Jack Jones, looks at him from behind the wheel and smiles. “Mark, get in the car” is all he has to say. Getting in the car with Jack means conceding to a trip over state lines and possibly breaking at least state, if not federal laws, according to nearly every story passed around the family. Dad protests at first, but there’s not much use in saying no to Jack. He can’t lose his job, he says. He can’t leave Debbie alone with the kids, he says. He’s broke and doesn’t have any business leaving the county, he says. And what is he supposed to do with his truck? “Jack was the most fun, but I hated to see his face at the door,” Mom will remember now.

  In this scene, Jack is dressed like one of the gangsters people said he knew. A friend of my dad’s, on seeing Jack around town wearing a large gold medallion and nothing else for a shirt, said to him in the utmost seriousness, “I didn’t know your uncle was in the Olympics.” When Jack runs you off the road and says get in the car, well, there really isn’t anything to do except leave your own truck where it is on the side of the road and get in the car. So Dad climbs into the Cadillac, and notes, for storytelling purposes, the velour tracksuit with the jacket’s zipper wide open to show off the gold medallion that hangs atop his rolls of opulent, browned fat and the coils of more gold chains piled around his neck. Jack made more money than just about anybody in Myrtle Beach and didn’t have to get up out of his recliner to do it, they say. In his obituary, Jack is described as “having a financial mind like no other,” which could not be argued with. Among his closest friends, continues the newspaper, was a state Supreme Court justice called Bubba.

  “Where are we going?” Dad asks a few times, and on the south side of Georgetown, ninety minutes past Conway, Jack finally answers.