We find ourselves next cruising through the flatlands of tobacco and cotton fields, with the swamps and their ghosts in the rearview mirror. Cue the Judds and Dwight Yoakam, Reba and Willie, Loretta and Conway. We all sang happily in and out of sync, never on or even near any key, until we passed the Columns, the white plantation outside Florence surrounded by trailers and locals sitting in beach chairs on their lawns with shotguns in their laps and Confederate flags disfiguring further such scenes. This was where the drippy moss disappeared from the tree limbs, and the air began to feel less fraught. The branches robed in webworms groped at the edges of the car here. One time Mom and I were driving at this point in the road under a sky that shone blue and rays of sun over one lane and poured rain across the other. “The devil must be beating his wife,” she said. Making it through this stretch, we came to the NASCAR racetrack in Darlington and could keep on with the deep and palliative croons of whoever was on the radio forever and ever amen until we pulled into Grandpa’s driveway in Charlotte. Before Mom could pull the key from the ignition, the boys and I bounded barefoot down the hill of rough, sun-hot driveway and into his arms. Who could pause to tie shoes with excited, clumsy fingers when he was waiting for us? Here I am feeling greedy for the next memory that I retrieve, rewind, and replay by choice for a change. One wherein I am enfolded in blissful safety and lifted spinning from the burning summer pavement as kid laugher floats over a chorus of cicadas and ice cubes clink the edges of a glass of bourbon. I was always the first to be picked up and held aloft. He smelled of the bourbon he drank out of a wax Dixie cup, vetiver-laced cologne, shoe leather, and oak trees, which were taller and whose limbs seemed to climb upward instead of in the crooked sprawl of home. Lightning bugs danced between dusky peach rays of twilight, and I kissed his cheek. I could taste the salt of sweat and feel his calm, openhearted authority.
Atop the red-brick patio, Grandpa stood in sagging khakis and canvas boat shoes and nothing else but his glasses. He clapped his hands together while we double-hopped the steps to reach him. “Hey, kiddos!” He pulled the phrase out as long as his arms, which were deeply tanned and damp with sweat. On these weekends, he never wore a shirt, and his stomach ballooned over the waistband of his pants. Again we pause on the vanity of men, which grows in step with success.
His one-story brick house was an odd arrangement of hallways and living rooms that led to bedrooms and centered around a kitchen. Despite its unusual shape, it was always lively on these visits. It was also a bona fide bachelor pad, complete with a wet bar, pool table, and hot tub. He was the only adult who regarded our input as valuable as a grown-up’s, while still indulging us in childhood. On summer mornings, he invited me to pick scuppernongs with him from the mass of grapevines that enshrouded a corner of his back porch. “What’s your favorite subject, kid?” His question was followed by a scuppernong seed that he spit into the yard. “English,” I said always, and my own scuppernong seed would fall just past my feet. He’d laugh and brush it off the side of the porch without a word. And as everybody else in the house slept in, we asked each other questions—Where did I want to go to college? What was his favorite country he’d ever been to?—and eat the vine clean.
These weekends were carefree ones of games of pool and darts in Grandpa’s living room. We pretended to pour scotch on the rocks into wax-paper Dixie cups. Enjoying pretend games of doing what men did. We slept in Mom’s old bedroom, starting out on floor pallets, and in a rush of fear in the presence of invisible forces, hair on limbs stood up as our dog’s would in a thunderstorm. You see, we woke every night to footsteps pacing back and forth in the attic above the bedroom and the hallway. Mom heard them, too, and just how active the ghost was on nights was the usual breakfast conversation. Here, ghosts were not stories or threats, but were heard, felt, acknowledged by the adults as real.
There was no doubt that the sounds that woke us were footsteps, the heel-toe thud-tap of a man’s heavy shoes laid down to a remembered heartbeat rhythm. Some nights they would start in the attic and then sound suddenly in the brick hallway just outside our door. Grandpa bragged that he had the ability to communicate with spirits, as Dad had with dogs, and named his house ghost Harvey, like the invisible rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart movie. Though he loved to tease us as grandfathers do, and was as rational-minded as any engineer on most counts, he claimed to share his home with Harvey, having first surmised the presence of something supernatural in the house after he and his four children, then teenagers, had barely moved in. He had woken one night to his bed shaking violently and the indentation of a figure lying next to him in the sheets. He said that he was never so scared as that initial encounter, not even when piloting planes in the Air Force. He jumped out of bed and flew through the front door and drove to his office to wait for sunrise, still wearing only underwear. At three a.m., he left his four sleeping children alone to deal with whatever it was, until he came home and had a long talk with the ghost. It was his house first, after all, and Grandpa’s prevailing instinct was always to befriend. If ever we were left alone, he always said, “Don’t be scared. Harvey will look after you.”
An aunt told stories of Harvey’s most disruptive years of haunting, when he unlocked and swung open the bathroom door when she was showering or otherwise naked. “Don’t worry about Harvey,” she said to me, in a line of half tease, half comfort. “He’s not mean. He’s just a pervert.” Even in death, this man could not keep his eyes and hands to himself, and I was advised to put up with his harassment because it was felt to be good-natured. Boys will be boys, even in the afterlife. Were his groping ministrations on this side of the grave, I had a feeling my aunt’s advice would be about the same, which bothered me more than the peeping habits of some lecherous old ghost. The air in the house did seem peculiar. Thinner. As if I could fall right through it and straight into another dimension.
Grandpa talked aloud to Harvey when they were alone, but I listened from behind corner walls, usually when he rolled biscuit dough or mixed pancake batter at the kitchen counter in the mornings. He most often spoke to Harvey after his kids returned to their homes, to fill the silence of an empty house. He believed Harvey saved his life one night, making amends for the night he scared him out of bed. The oven was turned on by his teenage son, who then fell asleep. As Grandpa told it, Harvey woke him with a clattering of pots and pans and cabinet doors until he got out of bed and discovered half the kitchen in licking, hungry flames. One evening, after watching young people sing and cry standing over a crumbling wall, Grandpa showed me the cities and countries from the news on the globe that stood by his bookcase. It must have been early winter 1989. Running my fingers over the raised bumps of mountain chains and the plastic line of the equator, the world seemed available to me for the first time.
If a hurricane can pick up a house and put it down whole in the next county, their swirling winds can take us back two months with ease. Their winds blow counterclockwise, after all, practically made for time travel. A different ghost has warned of disaster, and we must return to Myrtle Beach. In September 1989, the Gray Man had been spotted in Pawley’s Island by more than one witness. South Carolina was preparing for the biggest hurricane since Hazel. Looking at my Rand McNally map, I could see where Hugo had blown off the violet coast of Africa and was swirling like a carnival carriage across the Atlantic, and the Gray Man had a better track record than the weatherman. Forgive my manners, but I will only tease a cordial introduction until the appointed hour of our own sighting within these pages. His true identity is unknown, anyway. Who was he before he was a solemn apparition that walks the beaches of Pawley’s Island as a warning to residents to flee, to go, to live? There are several different stories, and when the time is right, you may choose whichever suits.
Everybody knows that things are about to get serious when the Gray Man shows up, and folks who wouldn’t dream of evacuating their beachfront property when the State Guard knocks on their door, as they did before Hugo, saying essentially, “
If you’re gonna ride it out, you’ve gotta sign away government blame if either home or life is lost,” will pack a bag and follow the blue-spiral evacuation-route signs all the way to Appalachia. They’ll do that if word gets out that he’s been walking the shore. Though, they say if you see him, your house will be spared, and you have only to see a strip of shore the day after a storm to know the truth. There are always a handful of beachfront homes perfectly and sporadically preserved, while the neighboring houses, as solidly built and all up on stilts, as is the law, are soaking, salty debris piles. Some houses even crack ragged and straight down the middle like a cartoon egg. Tape up the windows, bring in the bicycles and toys from the yard. Wait in line at the Scotchman to fill up the car and get a few extra gallons of gas. Are there batteries in the kitchen drawer? And where the devil are the flashlights? Fill up the bathtubs and extra buckets with tap water while it’s good and running, so you can brush your teeth and flush the toilets, though I don’t know that the tap water in Horry County has ever been that good. It turned all our teeth yellow.
Hugo hit as the sun went down on a muggy late-September school day in 1989. A car in a hurry to get out of town had hit a power line and knocked out our electricity early that morning. The county didn’t bother to fix it. In a few hours, everybody’d be without power anyway. Our little brown house on the edge of Conway was a few miles inland of the Intracoastal Waterway, where the turn-bridge has since been replaced by a tall concrete one that looks down on it. The Waterway is still the line of demarcation separating must-evacuate from probably oughtta. Nana and Granddaddy, who could see the ocean a half mile from their house on Calhoun and King’s Highway, packed a few bags of jewelry and family photos and came to ride out the storm with us. If Hugo had not been expected to come ashore as the strongest hurricane ever to hit our coast, a hurricane party would have been in order somewhere. If you’re not a Baptist on a Sunday, there’s not a lot that will inspire sobriety on a weekday in the Low Country, but a category-five hurricane might be one of them.
Once the power went out at our house, we got our flashlights and radios out. I remember being a little bit bored, anticipating the awe of great forces I was too young to grasp, but interpreted as fun. Like the ups and downs of the roller coasters at the Pavilion, or the thrills of ghost stories by candlelight. It was too dark to see what made all the noise outside, and there was a lot of noise outside. The adults were worried about it. Nana and Granddaddy sat on the brick hearth of our little fireplace in silence. Nana stroked her toy poodle, Tiffany, and recalled talk of finding snakes blown up into tree limbs after Hazel. Dad had gotten the poodle, to ease Nana’s loneliness, from the captain of a boat called Mistress Tiffany, who had a pet monkey and with whom he gave moonlight tours of the inlets and marshes. They left from Drunken Jack’s after the bar closed, and the monkey went around the boat collecting tips in a captain’s hat.
Dad paced around the living room with a radio in hand, and Mom kept watch over the candles. Justin, Jason, and I made a game of seeing who could hold their palm over the dreamy, dancing flame for the longest, and I won, of course. If I had been able to endure parading on stage in sequins and bathing suit, I could endure the pain of fire. Hugo came ashore a category four, the eye making landfall just above Charleston, and spawning in Conway half a dozen tornados at that darkest time right before dawn that ripped up the live oaks at Witch Links golf course a few miles down the road. We learned later that that was the freight-train sound we heard in the dark. Maybe the adults knew all along the sound of tornado winds and spared me the knowledge. My brothers slept the whole night through, as I listened to both Mom’s worry and the winds.
Uncle Mike thought he would outsmart the storm and shelter to the south. He took Chris and Brian to the safety of a high-rise hotel by Charleston’s harbor. Hugo’s eye was projected to come ashore at Myrtle Beach, you see, and while it is usually true that most storms crook northward at the last minute for more civilized ground in North Carolina, Hugo bent south, so that Mike’s instinct had taken his family right into the eye of the storm. They were okay and only got stuck in the hotel for a few days without power. Don’t be fooled by the relief of an open eye above. The back end of a hurricane is the most dangerous.
Early the next morning, I crawled out of Mom’s bed, leaving her and the boys asleep. Nana and Granddaddy had taken my room and were not out yet either. Dad had cranked his pickup truck and was listening to the news on the car radio with the driver’s door open. I sat on his lap looking at the tender pink blisters I had earned holding my hand over the candle, as we listened to the weather forecast. It was a cool and sunny fall day. The pine forest around the perimeter of our house was still there, but every single tree was bowed down at the waist as if in supplication to the clear blue sky. “After Hugo, none of our maps worked anymore,” Dad recalls.
Nearly fifty people died in South Carolina, mostly from drowning and electrocution, and for a while it was the most damaging storm ever recorded. Dad was especially hard in reminding us not to play in even the smallest puddle until about Christmas that year, much less jump in any creek or ditch water. “If the alligators or snakes don’t get you, you’re liable to get electrocuted.” With all the flooding, the wildlife was as displaced as the humans. When we returned to school, we heard stories of gators moving into backyard swimming pools. The Swamp Fox roller coaster down in Garden City had blown away. The worst story I’d heard came from McClellanville, just outside Charleston, where the eye made landfall. I know now that the story as it was told and retold did not happen that way. That human nature is attracted to the tallest of tales, and the need to share what we have witnessed spirals into gossip of the most inconsiderate kind. And while it’s true that nearly the whole town sheltered in the local high school’s gym, which really did flood up to the ceiling in the middle of the night, the rumor passing among my classmates that everyone had drowned is not. I know now that nobody died in the gym that night but still on occasion hear the story passed around as if the rumor, by now the beginning of a legend, were stronger somehow than the truth. Everybody survived drowning by climbing onto the rafters, a story scary enough to need no embellishment to me, but then I am no longer a resident of the Low Country and don’t reckon to be again in this life. That such tragedy might have happened was not at all that hard to believe, especially to a child’s imagination. At Dora’s house, weeks after the storm, we watched from her porch as a whole house floated down the Waccamaw River.
When the National Guard allowed us to cross the swing bridge, Grandpa had us go see if his beach house in Cherry Grove still stood. He’d been so fond of his own beach memories that he’d bought a duplex on stilts and rented it out part of the year. We drove past turquoise and pink beach awnings that had been shredded by the wind, the shattered signs of the popular beach-wear stores that used to say EAGLES or WINGS where we bought our dollar-apiece hermit crabs, and boarded-up windows with their messages spray-painted to the storm. HUGO GO HOME was scratched on the plywood. When we got to Cherry Grove, we had to leave the silver station wagon at the end of the block and walk around puddles and piles of debris. The beach house was still standing, but under the carport was a pile of sand nearly all the way up to the ceiling. The carpet inside the house, one story off the ground, had been soaked through from storm surge lapping underneath. Where I stood had been ocean water well over my head, and as Mom did a lap around the house to assess the damage, I noticed the water line on the stilts and stairs that led up to the front door. The ocean had stretched a full block inland and had somehow returned to where it had always been, looking pleased and contented for the exercise.
Children recognize in something only their own relationship to it, and I had thought of the ocean as a friend that welcomed me into its warmth and seemed sad to see me return to land. That it was indifferent not just to my presence, but to that of whole towns and families, was a new consideration. It swallowed whole the pier I fished from and tore in half the walls of hotels wh
ose pools I snuck into, and it was not bothered a bit. This was an initiation into the logic of coastal life, an acceptance that danger was inevitable. Just as it is impossible to predict where the eye will make landfall, none of my family would have guessed that for the next hurricane that graces these pages, we’d be living on the north end of the Low Country.
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