Low Country Read online

  Dad acquired Ghost serendipitously and by accident, when a dog leapt into the car through the open passenger door. He was big enough to fill the whole seat, and they couldn’t entice him to jump out. Leaving the windows down, Dad said, “If he’s still in the car when we get back, I’m keeping him.” He was and so earned his name for materializing out of thin air.

  As this was in Columbia, the state capital, they would not have been far from the swamp chestnut trees and old-growth cherrybark oaks of the piedmont where some say resides the ghost of a black, shaggy dog just known as the Hound. In most renderings, he will give chase to lonely walkers late at night, but this particular tale has always seemed too skeletal for my tastes. Ghost stayed with my dad for many years. They took long road trips and went deep-sea fishing. They took a johnboat to the tip of Sullivan’s Island, next to Fort Sumter, and rode the elevator to the top of the tetrahedron lighthouse locals call the Charleston Light. It was built in rare modern style in the years after Hazel to withstand the gusts of future hurricanes. From there, Dad and Ghost caught sight of the older lighthouses at Cape Romain a few miles up the coast. Under the water between these sentries lie the remains of the Planter, the steamship overtaken and liberated by the enslaved people onboard in 1862. After the Confederate dolts in charge disembarked for a night of drinking, an enslaved deckhand named Robert Smalls put on a captain’s uniform and sailed past the Southern watch posts, straight through to the safety of the Union blockade offshore. He freed himself, his family, and the whole crew, and the Planter sailed from then on for Lincoln. It sank during a storm a decade later, after delivering cotton to Georgetown, well into Smalls’s term as a congressman for South Carolina. Driving down Highway 17 one afternoon with Ghost, Dad was rear-ended and rammed into the car in front of him. He blacked out and woke concussed to a trucker shaking him and offering to take him to the hospital. “Just take me home,” he said, but then could not recall where that was. They drove ’round and ’round a neighborhood that seemed sort of familiar, and on the third or fourth time that Ghost barked with urgency in front of one house, the truck driver said, “I think this is where you live, son.” The dog disappeared just as he’d shown up in the first place. Ghost’s is a better story than the Hound’s.

  By the time Dad and Ghost were living with his brothers, Mike and Leslie were very nearly full-time gamblers, paying the rent playing cards and tending bar. Perhaps wanting his own fearsome hound, my uncle Leslie responded one day to an ad in the Sun-Times. TIMBER WOLF FOR SALE. After driving eight hours to Rock Hill and back, half the time with a wolf in the back seat, it turned out that the wolf had more sense than my uncle and didn’t care much for his or anybody else’s company. In fact, he didn’t care at all for being pent up in a beachside condo and spent his days and nights pacing the floor and snarling at anyone dumb enough to think about coming into the bedroom where they kept him. Les threw a piece of raw chicken at him from the doorway twice a day for a few weeks, before some other kid took him away to let him loose in the swamps around Conway. Perhaps his descendants have joined the Hound or Ghost to wander the pine forests that connect the marshland to the jade tobacco fields, before the soil turns to terra-cotta red in the piedmont that yearns upward toward lush, wild Appalachia, though I’d be more scared of snakes than wolves in a Southern fairy tale.

  The boys had all spent their early years in the back rooms of Granddaddy’s first motel, a squat two-story concrete affair painted gray and white on the beach side of Ocean Boulevard, much like the other motor lodges that sprang up in the 1950s. Sticking out like a hitchhiker’s thumb above the sidewalk, an Atomic Age sign of a blonde mid swan dive in a red bathing suit offered THE SEA DIP like an afterthought in Space Age Filmotype. They’d all been put to work as soon as they could talk and knew well the routines of life on the beach. They’d hop between restaurants bartending and tending the arcade games and waiting tables and stripping hotel sheets as needed, taking their cues from calls from uncles and cousins who owned every other establishment in town. As they earned only their keep from working for their father, they’d sometimes make fast cash in card games or other gambles, like diving for sand dollars as children and later dabbling in cocaine that continued its speedboat delivery from South America. They knew, as all young people from tourist traps inevitably discover, that getting high is the fastest and surest way of getting out of town.

  Back at Drunken Jack’s, where we agreed to meet earlier, my parents’ love story, like all good ones, begins with an act of persuasion. Having been warned of his reputation by the hostess, a former waitress at the Hawaiian Village, Debbie refused the advances of the smooth-talking, dark-haired bartender. Between the aquarium on one side, babbling its unnatural shades of blue and bobbing with imported fish the bright oranges and yellows of drowned plastic mini-golf balls, and the waist-high stage on the other, she turned him down every night as she put in her drink orders. What started as an attraction became an opportunity to perform. Their relationship started on a stage, which is what they had both been waiting for without knowing it. As all young people do, my parents took their youth for specialness, believing that they deserved to be discovered by the world at large, and where fame hadn’t yet found my dad in South Carolina, love shone a spotlight instead. To be noticed and loved for nothing but being yourself is an attainable acclaim. Adoration elevates our opinion of ourselves. As it should, my nana would say. Love lets you expect more even when you’ve got less, and what didn’t they expect once they got together.

  Have you seen it coming? How he won over the prettiest waitress this side of the Waccamaw? He wrote her a song. He set up a microphone, threw down some carnations, tied some balloons to the light fixtures in his brothers’ apartment, and sang a song written about her and crooned only for her ears. Les had gotten rid of the timber wolf by then, and they had the place to themselves. It is a truth that my brothers and I grew up acknowledging as universal that a stage always means success. He had yet to transition from baseball cap to cowboy hat, from Converse to cowboy boots, and sang from the heart. Mom found the lyrics scribbled on a tornout sheet of notebook paper that was rolled up, tucked inside a wooden jewelry box alongside a mood ring gone a final shade of verdigris, some pocket change, a guitar pick, and a book of matches. Most treasure maps don’t ever get found. Just like in the movies, when she discovered this one almost forty years after it was last seen, the paper had ambered with age and frayed along the edges. Old ink bled the bridges into the chorus, but Drunken Jack’s matchbook portrait smiled still at the love song written on an aging telescope of paper.

  3

  _________

  Horse Thieves & Millionaires

  NOW THAT I AM HALFWAY ON THE SCENE, WE’LL continue our study of historic documents forgotten inside closets, shoeboxes, coat pockets, and photo albums, among which I include love notes, grocery lists, records of sale, old pictures with those wavy edges, lapsed calendars, diaries with years embossed in gold at the bottom right corner of the cover, birthday cards, and fast scribbles across the back of my hand. Let us pull from one such shoebox a photograph of the Gay Manor Hotel, which started it all for the Joneses. A postcard from 1948 in shades of black and gray shows what must have been a white brick building of three stories between Ocean Boulevard, on the south end, and the Atlantic. “670 Miles South of New York, 735 Miles North of Miami” reads a corner of the card, whose parking lot is filled with old, curvaceous black cars. Today it is a pizza parlor in the shadow of the SkyWheel, and a history book says it was started by the Jones brothers, but really it was their father, Harvey, from whom they bought it after World War II. The brothers old enough had all served in the Navy. Harvey Jones had traveled all over doing odd jobs and construction, pulling small-time scams and bootlegging to support his family of sons and one daughter. After they were married, Nana’s mother said every chance she could, “There weren’t any millionaires on our side of the family, but there weren’t no horse thieves neither.”

  The Jone
ses settled in Myrtle Beach from Cool Spring, South Carolina, twelve miles north of Conway and east of Dog Bluff. The money for their first hotel built in the 1930s, one of the first on Ocean Boulevard, came from a gas station run by Harvey’s wife, my great-grandmother Pearl, only ever called Ol’ Mama and acknowledged as the boss. She ran the backroom dealings at the Gay Manor Hotel and the gas station and everywhere else they managed to acquire. Gambling houses and poker dens. Rum-running and burlesque joints. I have only ever seen two photos of her. One in black and white standing unsmiling in a white shirt and black skirt to the floor beside her husband. The second is in color, but tinged the red of photographs from decades past. It’s from a baby shower, my mom and Uncle Leslie’s wife each pregnant with another Jones boy at the same time, and Ol’ Mama stands crinkled with age and thick glasses behind a group of her grandchildren and their wives. I only know it is her from asking. Her voice low and coarse, she was not much for small talk. She drank her share of the whiskey, as likely to pull a pistol as pull you into her arms.

  I can tell you little with absolute certainty except that if you want to get rich, try drinking. That is to say, other people’s drinking. Snake oil goes down quick in a cocktail. Harvey Jones had a lesser design, but a design nonetheless, in mind when he took his six sons into moving moonshine during Prohibition, after the war, and into the decades of brown-bag laws that kept alcohol out of reach, except if you knew a guy. They were not alone in the rum-running. Pirates of old favored the Grand Strand and the Low Country for the same reasons it became popular with the bootleggers, and thus anyone else looking for a good time. The water, the inlets and marshes and waterways that changed between storms and by phase of the moon, made hiding out from the law a breeze. Where Harvey and his sons the Jones brothers pioneered perhaps was in combining the bootlegging with their other entrepreneurial endeavors, and putting the money back into Ol’ Mama’s backroom casinos. From the postcard, it is easy to see how big the trunk of a standard car was then. The younger brothers, my granddaddy among them, kept a whole liquor store and a cash register hidden in the trunk, selling and doling change from the parking lots around Myrtle Beach. So go the family stories passed around like a bottle in a paper bag. Whenever an unfriendly cop came rolling by, they simply closed the trunk and drove down the boulevard.

  When the law is not on your side, you pour it a drink and put it in the hand of a half-naked waitress. The Jones brothers spent the ensuing decades building more hotels, buying land and leasing it out, creating the golf courses, seafood restaurants, and carnivals that bring the tourists still. It was my great-uncle Keith, the eldest of the six brothers, who had this vision to go grand, to see high-rise hotels and resorts decked out in the hedonistic exoticism of the Cold War. What goes around comes around, so they say, and I have wondered if affluence built on the windfall of vices has some comeuppance brewing alongside the booze. A rifle propped in the arm of the couch reaches to be picked up. Touch me. Use me. Hurt something, and if it’s only yourself, then you have done your heroic best in this life. A bottle of whiskey’s not a Winchester, but few things in this world are portals between the here-on-earth and the gauzy realms of ghosts. Bullets and bourbon may as well be communion wafers and the blood of Christ in the swamplands and swashes of the Low Country.

  The Joneses have always felt separated by the lines of legitimacy and the law from the other contributors to the community. The two families who separately and as business partners have owned most of the commercial and residential real estate around Horry County since eighteen hundred and something, the Burroughses and Chapins, rode into town on the railroad, by way of timber. The first railroad between Conway and New Town opened in 1900 and was commissioned so that the Burroughses could move and sell more lumber. The Seaside Inn, the very first hotel in Myrtle Beach, was built when Myrtle Beach was still New Town in 1901 and the Joneses were in Cool Spring.

  Before tourism kept us afloat, the longleaf pine forests were sucked dry of the clear, sticky sap to make turpentine and tar for the rest of the world. As far as China, which is about as far as it gets, Carolina tar was famous for its hold. The sap drips still from the longleaf and loblolly pines, sticking to bare feet and fingertips the same as always. A hard scrub with some paint thinner will wash the sap from skin, and nothing but time gets out an indigo stain. Before rice, cotton, or turpentine took off as Low Country staples, enslaved people stirred and beat the soaking indigo plants in brick vats still lined wavy blue in the woods above Charleston to transform this swamp-grown Indigofera suffruticosa into blocks of blue mud that dried into gold. For a time in the eighteenth century, during the reign of Queen Anne and during the Golden Age of Piracy, the Long Bay was the world’s largest producer of indigo, but not the wild indigo indigenous to the Low Country that grows in sweet stalks of pink flowers that resemble its cousin delphinium, named in Greek for its flowers that bloom in the shape of dolphins. A man known as “Alligator” Stephens published an instructional on getting Bahama indigo from seed to plant to commodity in 1745, but it was Eliza Lucas Pinckney who allowed the Low Country’s blood to run blue. The mother of indigo. The mother of patriots. The plantation heiress. Born in Antigua on a British sugarcane plantation before moving to what is now called Bluff Plantation of Wappoo Creek above Charleston, she was sent in 1740 the seeds for Bahama indigo and set about cultivating the hardiest crop and its subsequent production, stealing the methods from the Africans she enslaved. Production slowed only when the colonies declared themselves America, an independent nation, and once the war was won, something called the cotton gin had come to South Carolina. Pinckney is credited by some as the author whose imagination penned the South Carolina agrarian economy and sneered at by others as an overrated archetype, a maternal mascot, who got carried away with the gardening. The names of her sons stain the paper of the Declaration of Independence, and during the Revolutionary War, indigo cakes were the currency of the day. The memory of indigo plantations stains the Low Country as the ink of tattoo parlors bleeds into the landscape today. Land, like the rest of us, must have a hard time letting go, and what’s buried is not always treasure. Indigo is the color of the state flag.

  Eliza’s future husband, a widowed neighbor, once derided her experiments, possible only with the stolen knowledge and bound hands of enslaved people from Africa. Their marriage is recollected by history as a happy one, his opinion of her as a “little visionary” in one letter might have grown as did her success. If advancements, even the stolen kind, in the Low Country must rely on unchaperoned heiresses, it is no wonder there have been so few. On the subject of pine forests and heiresses, I cannot leave out the legacy of an Elizabeth Chapin. I never knew a Chapin myself, but have wished I knew the heiress to the fortune of the Wall Street mogul Simeon, his daughter Elizabeth. The Joneses, unlike the Chapins, have never been wealthy enough to bank on eccentricity, and Elizabeth wore her nonconforming ideas as fashionably as a mink coat. She was an avid worshipper of a sect that still makes its home off of King’s Highway, and she built a hideaway devoted to worshipping the avatar Meher Baba back in 1944. I stood outside a bar in New York one snowy night long after I’d moved away and was astounded to meet a man who had also grown up in Myrtle Beach. My hometown was not the same as his, however: mine is a place reputed to have the highest number of strip clubs per capita in America, with a NASCAR Café and beach shops that specialize in Confederate flag bikinis, and this young man had grown up among the untapped pine trees of Meher Baba’s virgin soil. While I celebrated my cousin Chris’s tenth birthday at the Briarcliffe Mall Hooters restaurant, this kid was across the street wrapped in monk’s robes and meditating in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary. Elizabeth’s abbreviated story has always floated around town like those long aerial banners advertising happy hour specials and boogie-board rentals that swim across the sky above sunbathers, and I have always envied her the freedom to pay for peace and quiet, and wished it for the women in my story.

  While that kind of New
Age spirituality might find tolerance on the north end of town, even if hidden in the woods, it wouldn’t cut it on the south end, whither we return presently to tally up the Jones men, the sons of Harvey and Ol’ Mama. Granddaddy has a picture of all his brothers lined up in middle age along the side of one of their daddy’s turquoise Thunderbirds. From left to right in this photograph, the six Jones brothers all wear golf pants in various patterns of checkers and pastels. First we have Keith, who ran the construction company built on moonshine money and who died in a car accident rumored to have been caused by either the mob or the FBI. Then Wilbur, who, before dying of lung cancer at Myrtle Beach Hospital the same summer we expected Granddaddy to die from a mysterious head injury just one floor below, once sued the very same hospital for operating on the wrong leg. Next we have Granddaddy, then Wendell and Herman, and finally Jack. Not pictured is their only sister, Doll, whose real name was Dorothy. As women among men are playthings and novelties, she was only ever called Doll her whole life. I knew Aunt Doll only a little better than I did my great-uncles, half of whom were dead by the time I came around, but recognized her as another woman raised among men. She kept a neon-green parrot, that we knew as not just mean, but a snitch. It would squawk if my brothers and I ever tried to sneak up her staircase to the forbidden and irresistible second floor, which was every time we were at her house. My second cousin Kay keeps the bird still, and if I were her, I’d have let it fly long ago. In the early 1970s, upon receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer and dealt two years to live, Harvey hopped in his tomato-red T-bird, picked up his mistress, and drove to Mexico without a word wasted on wife or family. From south of the border, he called Keith, the undoubtedly visionary eldest son, with instructions for the business and no fewer sentimentalities than “Don’t fuck anything up.” At the end of those two years, when it was clear he was not long for this world, his lady love drove him back up to Ocean View Hospital, which I can’t help imagining as the only hospital that matters to us, Myrtle Beach Hospital, and from there, summoned his sons and their sons. These patriarchs with their designs and their dreams of sons. Upon their turn to see their grandfather for the last time, Dad and Les remember sitting in the parking lot, after high school got out but before their shift waiting tables at one of their uncle Herman’s seafood joints, smoking Camels, and talking only about what a bastard Harvey had been. Every generation gets a little better, leaves a stitch or two behind to close the open family wounds a little at a time. Their own daddy never up and fled the country for a few years with his mistress, at least. Even considering such a brazen desertion, Ol’ Mama did not act too fussed. To notice his leaving would not have brought him back. Women must not only tend to the wound but conceal the scar.