Carolina Moon

by Jill McCorkle

  But Cecil Lowe’s passion had been the ocean—his ultimate dream an oceanfront lot, where high-tide waves would slap and spray creosote-pitched pilings. He bought such a house in 1953, and Tommy’s mother never forgave him. She was pregnant and wanted a house in town. At the time he had sold one short story to the Saturday Evening Post, and he believed that first publication foretold a career of literary honors and money pouring in. The Lowes divorced a year later, not long after Hurricane Hazel hit the Carolina coast with a roar and persistent force that left his father’s dream property submerged. Ten points for the ocean, zero for Cecil, he was heard to have said out at the Waffle King Diner, the one spot in the dry county where there was liquor for the regulars. I surrendered when I saw the front porch cave in, he laughed, his eyes already glassy. For years he regaled folks around town with his tales of observing the hurricane, how, minutes before Hazel struck in full force, he fled to a friend’s house on the inland waterway, how they proceeded to drink through the storm, how fortunate they had remained in one of two rooms left standing.

  Tommy himself saw the ocean for the first time when he was six. A couple in town, Mr. and Mrs. Lonnie Purdy, loaded up the whole first-grade class in a big yellow school bus and took them on a field trip. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the Purdys had chosen to park the bus on the very piece of property that belonged to Tommy. They and the children had stood at the back of his lot at low tide, the very spot where thirty years later he dreams of a hot tub and permanent keg. That is, if the ocean ever coughs up what rightfully belongs to him, this pitiful birthright, submerged land and a stack of yellowed copies of the Saturday Evening Post, all with the same date, all with the same words in the table of contents: “ ‘A Dream of Lost Lovers,’ by Cecil Lowe,” a rather hot title to be found under the Norman Rockwell cover painting of a happily freckled, peachy-keen family, like Tommy Lowe never knew.

  But at six, he’d known nothing of his property. All he knew was he was thrilled to be there, thrilled to be in the presence of the Purdys, a couple so weird that children automatically assumed they were rich—Mr. Purdy drove an old Cadillac and wore driving gloves, and Mrs. Purdy wore long flowing dresses and a snake bracelet on her plump upper arm.

  What Mrs. Purdy told each new first-grade class was that she had grown up in Fulton and not seen the ocean until she was in high school. She told the children that the first time she ever saw the ocean, the first time she ever smelled the salt air, she felt she had seen the whole creation; she said she couldn’t put it into words, not then and not now, but the sight of the water, the swells and spray, gave her life “perspective.” Tommy remembers her saying that word, perspective, her shiny pink lips sounding it slowly, her painted-on eyebrows going up in a way that said, Do you get what I’m saying? She told the children that she had something to give back, a debt to pay, which is how she got the principal to hand over the school bus keys every September. The first-graders had never seen a grown-up who wore such strange-looking clothes. They had never known an adult who listened to them so hard, eyes wide and never blinking as she twisted her long dark hair around and around her hand. She had hair longer than any of the girls in the class, and it was exciting to be with her, to stand close enough to catch a whiff of her perfume. Even after Mr. Purdy died, she made this yearly pilgrimage so every first-grader in the town of Fulton, regardless of the last name or street address or money available, spent at least one September afternoon rolling in the sand and wading in the surf. Come that perfect fall day (and she invariably picked a good one), the children would all be there, lined up in front of the school waiting for a seat on Mrs. (now she uses Ms.) Purdy’s bus.

  THESE DAYS, TOMMY does a lot of work for Ms. Purdy (she has recently changed the pronunciation to Pur DAY). She dresses the same way exactly and her hair, though gray, is still yanked back in a bushy ponytail that reaches the middle of her back. Tommy does carpentry and brick work, furniture refinishing and repair. He recently finished building a huge deck to surround the hot tub he installed for her new business (a quit-smoking clinic), and now he’s building a closet in the small apartment she has over her garage. He once tried to tell Mrs. Purdy (she insists he call her Quee, though it doesn’t come off his tongue easily) what an impact she made on him with that trip, but she wouldn’t allow it. He was hoping to work his way up to thanking her for the other time she had helped him as well, that time when he was in high school with nowhere else to turn.

  Now he kneels in the firm, damp sand that belongs to him. He pays forty-one cents a year in county taxes and eleven cents to the city. Every day he takes a break from his work and comes here, sometimes just to sit, sometimes to wade in and pace off the lot, seventy feet deep and fifty feet wide. He sits back, jeans and sneakers wet and sandy, and scoops his hands into the sand. One of the few times he actually talked to his father, they were here, at the beach. Tom was ten and interested in the stories his father had to tell about the pirates who once inhabited these very waters. Cecil told him that their name, Lowe, was derived from George Lowther’s, a pirate from England who killed himself. “It makes sense that he would,” Tom’s father had said that day, the hem of his khakis damp, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up to just below the elbow. Then they drove back into town where his father took him to the new bank building to ride the elevator up to the third floor. It was the highest building in town.

  Tom tried that day to absorb all he could about his father. It had been six years since he had seen him and might be another six before he saw him again. He realized he had his father’s coloring, the straight, almost black hair and hazel eyes; he had the sharp facial bones and full lips. But his father was a lanky six feet and two inches, and Tommy was one of the shorter boys in his class.

  In the car, his father talked about Atlantis, how maybe somewhere out in the depths of the ocean there existed a whole world that had been swallowed, bottled. Tommy had tried to imagine it, his own town submerged, wavy and dark in the deepest depths. He imagined their house, a small brick ranch washed through: windows black, drapes undulating like sea anemones, sparse furniture held in place by the weight of the water. Cecil talked about how easily the world could come to an end—it could happen in numerous ways, to the world at large or to the world of an individual. “For instance, the world your mother and I created,” he said and paused, the car idling at the intersection. “It ended.” He stared straight ahead, jaw clenched, and in that moment Tommy understood why his mother hadn’t wanted to let him go on this outing. This was what she was scared about. This is what she must have meant all of those times she told Tommy that his father was a dark-hearted man. “It was sad that it ended,” he continued. “I love your mother. That wasn’t what it was all about.” Tommy wanted to ask then—as he has many many times since—what was it all about, then? Was it him? Had his being born ruined that world, because his father had certainly never said anything to take that burden away from him.

  His mother, on the other hand, told him many things, maybe too many things. She told him how she waited to hear from his father during Hazel, how Tommy was just an infant but Cecil had thought nothing of heading down to the beach with his buddies. He sat there, shit-faced (Tommy’s mother had used the word inebriated), and watched the storm, which he later described to Tommy’s mother with such clarity—the slate gray of the sky darkening still, while ferocious winds swept porches and piers into the sea like so many matchsticks. The rush of the blinding rain and the crazy kick of adrenaline as he braced himself for death.

  Tom’s mother had told him that when his father returned home two days later, it was like she was seeing a ghost. He hadn’t shaved, and he stood all hunch-shouldered out on the stoop where the rain still dripped from the aluminum awning that had fallen to one side. She told Tommy that she greeted him with a shush and pointed to the corner of the room where Tommy was sleeping in the playpen. Cecil went straight to the corner and knelt there, addressed his child as if he were an adult, informed him t
hat it was a great shame but due to forces of nature beyond his control he had just lost Tommy’s inheritance, a lovely piece of oceanfront property that should have been worth thousands. Whenever Tommy’s mother told that story, he tried to imagine his father out on the stoop, looking like a ghost. He wanted to believe that his father was like Gray Man, the famous apparition who arrives as a warning, a safety sign to those lucky enough to glimpse his shadowed form. It was in a book Tommy had read at school along with other ghost stories like “The Maco Light,” in which a headless man wanders the train tracks in search of his head, and the one where a Confederate general appears at dusk on the very spot he died at Fort Fisher.

  THIS SUNKEN PIECE of property haunted his childhood as he tried to imagine the house that had once stood. That house was his father’s world, a pirate’s cove, a treasure chest, golden words and a .38 revolver, while fifteen miles away his mother paced the small hallway from her dark bedroom to the front window. His parents’ romance was a story everybody in town knew because it was one Cecil Lowe told so often, his wooing and loving of one Betty Jean Kirkland, a shy sweet girl who was known all over town as the girl whose mother sewed wedding gowns in a fancy shop downtown. Her mother’s mannequin, Betty Jean often stood on a stool up in the window of the store, all dressed up in white shiny cloth while her mother knelt and tucked and pinned the fabric. She was pretty and slight, like a lovely silver moth, Cecil once wrote in a poem. The day he arrived in Fulton on his way from the bus station to the only hotel in town, he spotted her there in the window. He walked straight into the store and in perfect tune and pitch, asked the woman at the desk, “How much is that girlie in the window?”

  Tom’s mother’s stories were either good or bad. There was no gray area at all. His father was first handsome and brilliant and courtly and devoted and then despicable and hateful, selfish and cruel. He had been courtly and devoted on that October afternoon he and Tommy kicked through the leaves and entered the brand-new bank building. Everything still smelled of paint and plaster and the rubber backing of the new tan carpet in the offices. They rode the elevator in silence as Tom’s father talked about real skyscrapers and the way they are built to sway, built to give in to nature just enough that they can survive. “Not a bad code to adopt,” he said as the doors slid open and they stepped into the empty, glassed-in space. From here Tom could see the steeples of all the area churches, and he could see the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse. He stared at the cuffs of his father’s pants, still damp from their walk on the beach.

  “I’m taking you to all of my favorite spots today,” his father said. “Good view, huh?” His hands were deep in his pockets, and he jingled keys and change as he paced from one end of the room to the other. “Right over there is where I first saw your mother”; he leaned his forehead onto the glass and it was difficult for Tom to discern if he was staring down at Main Street or back into his own eyes. “She was quite the belle of the ball.” He pulled a lighter from his pants and then reached into his shirt pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes there. “But all did not go as planned.” He walked to the other end of the room and lit his cigarette, his hand cupping the flame as if he were standing in a windstorm. “I come up here and I see before and after. I look at where I first met your mother—the beginning—and I come over here and I see how it all turned”—he breathed in and blew a thin stream of smoke into the glass—“or rather didn’t turn out.” Tom walked over and followed his father’s pointed finger, looking through the glass, beyond the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, and right into the side corner of his own house, just one window visible, the rest safely concealed by the privet hedge and the large oak tree.

  “You just can’t get away,” he whispered. “You see?”

  Now he leaned against the glass, his hands cupped like blinders while the cigarette in his right hand burned dangerously low.

  “I’ve been up here at night before and watched your mother sitting there in the window. It’s where she always sat at night and where she still does. I planted that privet hedge. I dug a trench and filled it with water.”

  Without turning away, he crushed the cigarette into the windowsill and pointed his finger, squinted his eye as if lining up a scope.

  “No sir, Tommy. You will always be accountable for every second of your life. Do something good, and you can use it forever. Do something bad, and it’ll haunt the hell out of you. Your mother can act like I’m not a part of her life, but every night when she sits in that chair and looks out on that privet hedge, every night when I may or may not be watching her, every night when she’s watching you, then I’m there.”

  It was this memory, the view from the bank building, that is Tom’s last of his father. The only other memory he had was from when he was four, and now he isn’t sure if the memory was real or created. It is true that he was in the grocery store with his mother, and it is true that he saw his father. What he remembers is a tall man stepping from behind a pyramid of apples, green and red and yellow, the old checkered floor littered with pasteboard boxes and crates. He remembers several pieces of fruit rolling and landing in a succession of thuds, as his mother grabbed him by the hand and pulled. “Stay away,” she said through clenched teeth. “Haven’t you done enough by now?”

  “No, no I haven’t,” he followed them up and down the aisles, his dress shoes clicking with each step. “He’s my son, too. I want to make it up to him.”

  “Good,” she said. “Sell your underwater house for what you paid for it and send him to college some day. Buy him some school clothes and that Matt Dillon doll he talks about nonstop!” She stopped suddenly and pulled Tommy to her, smoothed his hair as if to apologize.

  “He’ll go to school.”

  “You’re damned right about that.” She froze and put a hand to her mouth and then let it drop to her chest, mouthed an apology to the woman in the checkout. Her mouth was quivering and her hands shook as she opened her billfold to pay for their food.

  “Tommy,” his father had whispered then and held out his hand. In the memory or what he believes to be memory, there is a sense of recognition, the hand reaching for him is safe, welcoming. “I love you,” his father said. “I never meant to hurt you.” Tommy doesn’t remember if he reached back. What he remembers is all the times he tried to reconstruct the memory, tried to chisel an image of Cecil Lowe into his mind. Even after the day at the bank, Tom had clung to the earlier memory, the part where his father said, “I never meant to hurt you.”

  And his mother confirmed his memory. Yes, they had seen his father in the store, his father had told Tommy that he loved him, had reached out and tried to get him to move away from his mother’s side. Tom’s mother said, yes, it was true that his father never meant to hurt him at all, and that’s why he chose to stick a gun in his mouth and blow himself away. And who was called to clean up that mess? Who? And all that was in the will was left to Tommy, that’s true. How wonderful. A moth-eaten tuxedo, twenty copies of that godforsaken story, and an underwater lot.

  Now his mother never even mentions Cecil Lowe unless Tom brings him up. Her life is church socials and the civic center, where she hands out programs for whatever ballet, school play, or band recital is held. Now the tide is coming in, the water up and foaming over the outline of the master suite.

  His own home fifteen miles away is nothing more than a flatbed camper on an empty lot. The camper’s two halves open like wings to form beds on either side, a canvas roof zippers down to the little half door. This is the property his mother gave to him, a lot on which she had dreamed of building the perfect house, but for whatever reason decided to stay where she was. It’s right in the middle of what is becoming the very nicest neighborhood: curbed and guttered, BMWs and Volvos in every drive, antebellum and Williamsburg, Tudor and contemporary; new houses springing from the earth like plants, growing and spreading to fill in every square inch of space with three-car garages and satellite dishes, swimming pools and tennis courts. The eart
h is scooped to the side and the grass is trucked in and rolled out, watered like clockwork by the underground sprinklers at every house on the street, skipping, of course, Tom Lowe’s yard and camper.

  People want to say something to him. They try to, in what they think are subtle ways. They say things like, “You must be planning some house, Tom,” and he just stares back and smiles. The truth is that he was here first. He was here when there were no streetlights and pavement. He was here when the pine trees were so thick that his camper and the narrow dirt road leading to it were completely hidden. His drive is still dirt, which turns to slick red mud in a hard rain.

  His trees are still thick and overgrown, wild blackberries rambling out front where he has recently (in response to the inquisitive neighbors) placed a giant thermometer sign. The sign says: “A home will be built on this site when the necessary money is raised.” He didn’t paint in any figures; he’s not building a house, at least not on this piece of land. His house will be on the beach with cross circulation of sea breeze, a view from every angle. In the meantime he has collected up to two thousand dollars in anonymous “love gifts” (as charity donations are called locally), some of which he uses over at Buddy Dog to adopt the biggest and oldest (and thus oftentimes most undesirable) canines to be had and the rest to care for them. He now has quite a collection: two labs and three beagles, several mixed breeds, a greyhound recently retired from a track down in South Carolina, a springer spaniel (Calico Jack), and a feisty, sometimes ferocious Pomeranian (Anne Bonny)—all named for pirates. All are fixed and all wear Invisible Fence collars, so that when unsuspecting neighbors come up close to peer through his pine trees, they are met by what looks like a band of wild dogs. The biggest dog, Blackbeard, is the same mutt he had when he moved into the camper, the same one who rides around in his truck all day, a collie with bad arthritis who has slept in Tom’s bed without any other invited guests for quite a few years. People act like his lack of a love life is far stranger than that he spends his time walking the boundaries of his underwater property and adopting behavior problem dogs. And that’s how he knows that people have about as much hindsight and insight as those big fake-brick pillars that mark the entrance to his neighborhood. If they did, they would not have to look back far in his life to understand his solitude and his desire to opt for nobody over just anybody. If they did, they might jump on his father’s suicide as an explanation, but they would only have grazed the surface. That’s why he likes doing work for Ms. Purdy, Quee; she knows another part of his life. She knew him when he stood waiting to either win or lose. She knew him when he was a senior in high school and known all over town as TomCat. TomCat Lowe, a name that has stuck and followed him all these years later.