Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  The bluffing was better, more suited to fits of giggles. I’d pretend to be laying a card on the discard pile and at the last minute flip it over and declare, “Gin!” Little kids love nothing so much as a successful trick.

  My brothers were considered too wild, too prone to the manners that went unchecked in them to be trusted so close to Dad’s leg, and it was just me and Dad telling stories, playing gin. No bets, though sometimes we tallied up cards unused in losing hands to keep score.

  “What do you think of your old one-legged daddy?” he asked with teasing exaggeration, but there was missing the daringness that had led him to talk back to the neighbor.

  “You look like a pirate,” I said, which made him laugh. The laughs you get as a child hold strong as other memories morph or recede, as stories must change to survive. It was my turn to retell to Dad the stories of my favorite pirates for him.

  Gather ’round, and I will tell some more tales of the Golden Age of Pirates. We have met already the most fearsome, Blackbeard, who, before storming ships for bounty and entering battles for blood, twisted gunpowder into the ends of his beard and hair and lit the strands to look like the devil come straight from hell. Who hung no Jolly Roger from his galleon mast, but strapped for all to see a human skeleton holding an hourglass. Who blockaded Charleston Harbor for the summer of 1718 and held captive prominent Charlestonians. Stede Bonnet we know already, Blackbeard’s less-competent friend and onetime partner, more of a professional acquaintance, it must be said, their workplace the high seas! I earlier left hanging the question of the Gentleman Pirate, but he was captured in a rowboat, kept in the dungeon of Charleston’s Old Exchange, and hanged alongside fifty less-colorful pirates in the purges that began in 1718. Speaking of colorful, there is Calico Jack, the pirate famed for the bright and flowery prints he liked to wear, “flowerdy,” Nana would say, for flying first the aforementioned flag with the skull and crossbones, for keeping not one but two lady pirates among his crew, and if they brought with them bad luck, then it was Jack who suffered it, and not the ladies.

  Mary Read and Anne Bonney were the women he allowed on his sloop, the Ranger. They bound their breasts, dressed as men, and enlisted as privateers, before realizing they could do better and becoming pirates. When Anne’s lover Captain Calico Jack was captured in Jamaica, she got a last visit with him before the execution, and instead of the comforting words of a mourning wife, she flat-out said, “Jack, if you’d fought like man, you wouldn’t be getting hanged like a dog.” Both women were caught, and upon sentence of death revealed that they were pregnant. Read died from childbed fever in a Jamaican jail, but Bonney disappeared from the record. Some historians believe that a relative bought her freedom and escorted her to Charleston or Virginia, where she lived out the rest of her days the luckiest woman alive.

  Waccamaw Academy closed at the end of that school year spent playing cards, and we would be sent to the public elementary school in Socastee. My new public school took annual field trips to the pirate dungeon in the basement of the Old Exchange in Charleston, practically the epicenter of everything pirate-related. Melting wax figures of pirates chained to walls and pinned in torture forever between pieces of wood were displayed in its brick basement with the wide archways that looked like the bowing between the legs of cartoon cowboys. Another place of sorrow and haunted by all manner of ghosts. The pirates executed along with Stede Bonnet in the hanging purges that capped the Golden Age are said to scream and rattle their chains in the basement that is still called a dungeon. Hair is pulled, backs are pushed on stairwells, cold fingers are felt closing around throats.

  Calico Jack was not the first or only pirate to fly a flag with fearsome images waving warnings to the ships and ports of the Carolinas. It was only his that caught on, for reasons lost, as he was not the most successful pirate, despite his progressive policies for aspiring lady pirates. The many flags of Black Bart show a sense of humor. A man in wide culottes standing on two skulls. A man in a tricorn hat toasting a skeleton. Blackbeard’s flag depicted a devil throwing a spear at a red heart. A common school assignment was to draw and color a Jolly Roger of our own. Stacks of photocopied paper, blank but for the outline of a rectangle, sat at the corner of the teacher’s desk for idle students to take and ponder the pirate life. In place of skull and crossbones, I layered wobbly circles and lines until my cat appeared.

  My parents received a settlement from the trucking company, but it was not enough to cover their hospital bills and a new car, much less what was about to come. Dad could not wait tables for that first year after the wreck, and Mom began painting and wallpapering the homes of Nana’s country-club friends for extra money. My parents did not hide their fighting from us, perhaps because it did not occur to them that we could hear their shouts. They considered us too young still to understand the implications of what they fought over, or maybe they considered us props in their own story, not yet writing our own. There was never enough money, and suggestions of selling the little brown house grew and grew. It was filled less and less with the love I knew.

  8

  _________

  Four of a Kind

  IT WAS NOT THE RIGHT TIME FOR A NEW BABY, and so it was time for Mom to fall pregnant again. While Dad dreamed of country-music stardom, Mom had always wanted about a dozen kids, and Dad says now that he always felt the more, the merrier. Periodically, she’d ask me if I’d want a baby sister. Despite his assertions now, Jason claims that Dad was angry about the baby, before he came around. Mom was elated at first. She loved being pregnant, she says, but this time was different. The constant fighting, the anxiety over money and marriage, three children already, only a year apart each. In her fourth pregnancy, she did not swell with the ease and delight she expected. My memories of this pregnancy do not include Jason’s, but are of Dad, without health insurance and back to waiting tables part-time, his leg not able to support his weight for long, limping with the gel-and-Velcro splint through Nana’s house to collect us after work, and of Mom looking tired and holding her belly when she came one day to talk with my new teacher at the public school. My grades were always marked down for writing in lovely smooth cursive. “The other children haven’t learned it yet” was the teacher’s explanation.

  Watching Westerns, Dad made lists of baby names on his legal pads from the blue paperback with the top-hatted storks on the cover. Shane or Luke. Mom wanted something starting with the letter J and thought it would be a girl, as she’d been sure I was going to be a boy. Summer air holds on to electricity, and maybe we were waiting on a crack of thunder that day at the end of July. My brothers and I were playing baseball in the front. Dad played guitar from the couch, and his whiskey-smoothed voice hovered over the bases. Mom had driven herself to the emergency room, but insisted that it was not an emergency. “You stay here and watch the kids,” she urged Dad. And then to me, “Nicole, you stay here and watch over your dad.” She’s always doing that, begging us not to make a fuss over her, as if it’s not habit after a lifetime. Recently she was bitten by a copperhead on the heel of her left foot, and it took her two days to get to a doctor. “It didn’t seem so bad until it turned black,” she said. I’ve had the thought to plant a ring of blackberry bushes around her house now, to attract black snakes that might eat the poisonous ones. What is the difference between that and Nana’s hanging up that picture of Jesus with the Veronica Lake hair, or women who pour circles of salt around their homes as an act of protection? By the time she went to the hospital, it was too late for antivenom. Her foot remained a sight worth the pictures she sent for another two weeks until returning to its usual size and shape.

  In the privacy of the emergency room of a Conway hospital—Lord knows what would have happened if she’d gone up to Myrtle Beach Hospital, a hospital where more than one Jones has gone for minor pains and been carried out dead—she relayed her symptoms. This man told her not to worry. Take some antibiotics, he scoffed, and he ignored the bulge of baby and her breath short from
pain. He assumed she was sweating from the heat and not her already sky-high blood pressure. “Hot out today,” he may have said, offering her a handkerchief. Then he wrote her a prescription to clear up an infection she didn’t have. No big deal, really. Be gone by supper-time. I can hear his smugness, can feel his eagerness to be out of the room. So she came home still in pain and carrying a bag of fried chicken for my dad from Oliver’s, just down the road from the hospital.

  Her complexion hung gray against the blue, cloudless sky like the moon sometimes did during the daytime. We stopped playing and approached her, giving one another looks of worry. Dad heard the car door thump and came outside, a smile and cigarette hanging from his lips. I could tell just by the way he sucked in the air with his cigarette on the side. Mom’s own lightness was vanishing, and when he saw, Dad strode forward with a purpose I rarely saw him possess. In his white tennis shorts and Drunken Jack’s T-shirt, he looked just like my brother Justin, except for the shiny purple scar that crawled out of the splint from his ankle to his knee.

  Dad moved the guitar from the couch and laid it on the coffee table, and it gonged as wood hit wood. The sound bounced around the room, not very loud, but silencing us all for a few seconds. Normally, he was so careful with the instrument and handled it more gingerly than he did his children. I heard it as an alarm, more than even the look of pain and worry on my mother’s face. Dad called Nana from the rotary phone on the kitchen wall, the rubber of his shoes flapping on the parquet, a sound so normal and incongruous with the feeling in the air that I wished I hadn’t heard it. I stood there in front of my brothers, staring at our mom, scared to move. She sat looking up through the skylights, bloated and waxy and near death with preeclampsia, though we didn’t know it yet.

  Not the most careful of drivers anyway, Nana sped inland toward our little brown house to reach her daughter-in-law, who I suspected she loved more than her son sometimes. Away from the beachfront villas of her neighbors. Down Highway 17. Through miles of pine trees. Turn down Highway 544. Over the turn-bridge and past the showboat that rested underneath. Then single trailers started to dot the side of the road. Locks of blond-white hair blowing with icy air-conditioning drafts. In her haste, she did not even bother to knot a scarf over her hair to keep it beauty-parlor perfect. She finally swished past the pampas grass that lined the streets of our neighborhood and pulled into the driveway.

  The only other mother in the house, she got to work. She soaked a washcloth with cold water for Mom’s forehead and told my father to get her to the hospital—again. Something is wrong, wrong, wrong. Often my dad and his brothers rolled their eyes at the advice of their mother. Though they protected her fiercely, Granddaddy’s words had effected their damage, they had been conditioned slowly by their father’s harshness to think of her as a woman with no sense. I watched as slowly, leaving our early childhood, my brothers and cousins talked down to Nana and clung more to one another, and excluded me from their games and business. We walked across King’s Highway to splash around the pools and waves less and less, and they wandered in a pack of boys to convenience stores, to loiter in the parking lots of strip clubs in strip malls, like the Doll House right next to the Food Lion.

  Together, Mom and Dad made their way to the white minivan that replaced the crumpled station wagon at a pace my mother’s weakening state and expanded frame would allow for, wheels screeching with urgency as they pulled out of the driveway. A thud of bumper on concrete, and they were gone, just as they had been when they went to Nashville before the wreck. The house was quiet and unusually clean. My parents had not yet erected a crib or even decided where to put their fourth child, who was about to be born three months too soon.

  Nana took us to her house, where she would have been expected, emergencies notwithstanding, to prepare a supper for Granddaddy, even if he didn’t show up, and to watch over Chris and Brian. She often cooked something to try to ease our minds, which achieved the desired effect not with comforting and delicious food, but with our giggling at how badly she cooked. Her one want as a grandmother. Overcooked spaghetti topped only with Country Crock margarine. Cold hot dogs wrapped in a slice of Wonder Bread. Collards and butter beans that made the whole house stink like feet for days. The meanness of our glee did not occur to us, though we had surely picked it up from watching her husband and sons belittle her minor quirks so often they were verbally transformed into complete ineptitude. But the predictability of this routine was palliative. She would ask us what we wanted to eat, not if we were hungry.

  Mom’s condition should have correctly been diagnosed as preeclampsia when she went to the doctor that morning. She had to be airlifted to a town an hour and a half away and maybe there they could save her and the baby, but saving each or both was not a given. Florence, South Carolina, had been a minor hub in the regional railroad, and had transformed since its closing into a small town where there was a small highway junction and was thus full of truckers and the businesses that catered to them. Strangely, there was also a state-of-theart neonatal hospital smack alongside the XXX video stores, the Burger Kings, and the road signs pointing you farther on to either the NASCAR racetrack in Darlington or the tourist strips of Myrtle Beach. My third brother was born at McCloud Regional Medical Center, which gleamed like a mirage, a miracle, in the middle of nowhere.

  The calmest of my brothers was born the most violently almost three months early, and his middle name means “gift from God.” Jared was born in emergency surgery, Mom sedated and nobody in the room to coo and cry over him. The doctors were more than half-surprised that he lived. For Dad, who trembled between gentleness and anger on normal days since the wreck, what could he have been thinking when the doctors could only say, “It’s too soon to tell.” He waited for days alongside his wife and his third son, the one who would look most like him, most like me. Jared weighed two pounds. He fit into the palm of an adult’s hand and had not yet grown eyelashes and his skin that had yet to feel the light of day looked sunburned. Needles and IVs streamed from his tiny limbs and attached to a dozen machines that pumped him full of medicine and oxygen. A tube taped to his mouth ended in his lungs to breathe for him. His fingers and toes were translucent, the colors of Dad’s scar when he first came home. I do not think I imagined watching the blood moving through his veins, the shadows of his organs.

  For the weeks my mom was in the hospital, extending into the rest of the summer, my brothers and I stayed at Nana’s house with our cousins. Nana’s house was as good as home and where we stayed the last time there was an emergency with our parents, but then it was Dad who was hurt and Mom who came home. With our cousins, we splashed in the green slime of the pool, lit fires in the treehouse, or looked for money in Uncle Mike’s couch. Nana reassured us that everything was okay, preferring to lie to us than to worry us, but I knew better. Dad stayed at the hospital with Mom, wearing only scrubs when his clothes became too dirty. Shuffling in sterile fabric that had to cover his hair, his feet, and his mouth, he visited her room and his son in the neonatal ward. Most of the babies, explained the nurses, were born to mothers who were drug addicts or were born dying. Dad called Nana’s house to give updates on their conditions: Jared kept pulling the ventilator out of his lungs, and Mom was weak but awake.

  One day in August, he creaked open the gate to Nana’s backyard and walked up the sidewalk to her door. He moved slowly, slower than my grandparents, thin and hunched and wearing the sunglasses I’d last seen him in. A new cigarette swayed in his mouth, nodding up and down as he told us to get in the car. We played games the whole ride up, familiar with this stretch of highway from trips to Charlotte, and begged Dad to stop at the fireworks stands on the side of the road. We knew that we were getting close when we passed what could have been a white-trash mirage of highway shopping in the middle of the swamp where Francis Marion hid out so long ago. Billboards of fading cartoon sombreros capped the letters of the South of the Border signs that began to crop up on roads that led to North Carolina. Firew
orks and gambling were not legal in that civilized northern state, and the crumbling advertisements for what would be contraband in a hundred miles were markers we knew to look for. In this particular marker, there was a boiled-peanut stand called Jimmy Carter Land, and his squinting caricature looked down on the cars passing. We didn’t know Jimmy Carter as the former president. To us, he was only the face welcoming us to the petting zoo, fireworks outlet, doughnut shop, and a XXX video store that also offered lacy lingerie.

  Dad told us to be quiet and to behave once we got to the hospital, but he didn’t say much else. He seemed changed already. For the first time, hints of a resemblance to his father peeked through his exhaustion. How tiring to fight the nature that you don’t care to claim. Everything about the hospital seemed advanced, shiny, and technological. That lives were saved here, you could tell from the road. It felt not at all like the hospital in Myrtle Beach. Dad told us not to touch her, just to hang back on the sides and talk. She’s been asking about you, he said. I was not prepared for the relief of seeing her, or for the way she looked, still bloated and gray. She lay completely horizontal in the hospital bed, hooked up to the machines around her, and her voice was too soft to hear when she spoke. We stayed only a few minutes in her room, the blinds closed so she could rest. It was the only time I’ve seen her sleep without the television running in the background. Justin and Jason remembered Dad’s instructions, but I hopped forward to touch her. My hand rested on hers briefly before, uncontrollably, I started to fall into a cramped hug. Dad grabbed my arm and whispered, “What did I tell you,” in a hissing tone I had heard before, but not from him.

  A nurse recognized Dad and waved us forward. She handed out sets of scrubs to me and to my brothers. For the first time, we would get to see Jared. I walked along the cracks of tiles to steady myself, despite years of mental drilling. Don’t step on a crack. The refrain was a frivolous precaution at this point. Mom had already cracked open. Then there he was. Arms and legs squirming feebly among the wires. His chest rose and fell to the rhythm of the ventilator beside him. “He’s strong,” my dad murmured over and over. “Look how strong.”