Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  The logic of the Low Country came back to me, though I had been unaware of casting it aside. It was as if I had seen the Lands End Light, the light that appears floating in the road outside Beaufort. There are claims that it is a car, or the ghost of a car long crashed. I prefer the story that it is a hag, and if you see it you are blessed. Now conditions are right for seeing a real ghost. For telling his story. A disaster both natural and catastrophic looms. I have spotted a man, I think, but I can see straight through him. His blurry form walks between the sand and clouds on the beach at Pawley’s Island and leaves behind no footprints. It is enough to know after seeing the Gray Man that you have been saved for something.

  Before he was a ghost who wandered our beaches to warn of dangerous hurricanes on the way, the Gray Man was one of the Swamp Fox’s soldiers. He was dispatched from the service of George Washington, on his way home to Pawley’s Island, a lovely town between Myrtle Beach and Charleston, to reunite with a beautiful lover, when he fell into quicksand in the swamps of Marion and died. After receiving the news, this heartbroken lady took a walk along the beach in front of her home, and though she knew him to be dead, her beloved soldier appeared in front of her eyes and told her that she and her family must flee the coast. There was a hurricane coming. They left and survived a great storm, while the whole island was swallowed by storm surge. No home was left standing when the water receded except for theirs.

  Or maybe he was the owner of a seaside inn whose life and livelihood were lost in a storm and who now returns to warn those listening.

  He is sometimes said to be the spirit of Blackbeard himself, either not yet finished scaring the coast, or atoning for the havoc he raged on the very shores he presently saves.

  Pick whichever story suits you.

  Do ghosts wait on us, as we so desperately look for them? “Life is about creating memories,” Grandpa used to say. Somewhere on some astral-plane space there is a version of all of this where Mom and Dad are not hit by that Mack truck, I’m meeting Grandpa for a drink tonight, and Nana is rocking on her porch swing, a great-grandbaby cooing in the nook of her neck, as she sings, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.” When I need to talk to the dead these days, I take out the sweaters that smell like them, swiped from bureaus and the same hallway closet, where, after a funeral, a piece of curled-up notebook paper with a love song written on its faded lines was excavated alongside a matchbook from Drunken Jack’s in a jewelry box found by accident in a closet at Nana’s house.

  13

  _________

  Nana’s House

  ON THE LIVING-ROOM WALL AT THE LLAMA Farm, Mom has hung Dad’s Grammy nomination on the wall. Best Country Music Song stands in gold next to his name. It’s bigger than you’d think it’d be with the frame and its trimmings. The certificate hangs next to a picture of the two of them on the red carpet, walking into their sacred ceremony dressed in sparkles and satin. Finally they are where they always dreamed of being. Mom’s had her hair shaped in hot-roller curls like how she did mine for pageants, and she’s wearing a glittering beaded gown that brings out her green eyes. She looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her, and Dad looks slightly disbelieving in his tux. He brought a Stetson but left it back in the hotel room, and though he didn’t end up winning the Grammy that night, I know he’s got a scribbled speech in his pocket that starts out, “I’m just a country boy from South Carolina with a sixth-grade education.” I have seen him practice for the next time at the wheel of a new, paid-for pickup truck with a red plastic cup in one hand and conducting his music at full, exuberant volume with the other. His fingers move across what is visible to him, just as they did when he saw Whiskey Jones up on a marquee above King’s Highway.

  On Christmas Eve of 2016, a year that seemed to start out so joyfully as my parents walked the red carpet at the awards ceremony, Nana was taken to Myrtle Beach Hospital for a minor something. Do not worry, the doctors and nurses said, and we believed them. If one of us had insisted on staying after visiting hours, would she still have been given the medicine by mistake that slowed down her heart until it stopped beating? The heart is a muscle that remembers just like any other. Hers was shocked back to beating, but my nana’s didn’t come back with its pattern and she lay in a coma from Christmas Day until New Year’s Eve. We tried to wake her, stroking her curves as familiar as the sand dunes across King’s Highway and watching her feet tap to time as if she were in her rocking recliner waiting for the phone to ring or the patio door to open. “Where do you think she is right now? Is she a little girl again?” Dad asked this as we sat on either side of her bed, each holding a hand. Her eyes opened at times, still as bright and serene as the haint blue looking down on the Low Country, as if her eyes were the sky itself. I have come to wonder if the failings of South Carolina medicine was the Lord’s work. After I landed in Myrtle Beach the day after her heart attack, still hoping Nana would wake up, I was waiting on the curb for Ralph Howard and Jason to pick me up, when Jared called. Had I heard yet that our cousin Chris was dead? That, in fact, Nana’s heart had stopped at the same time that Chris had died of a heroin overdose in the last hours of Christmas Day.

  We removed the life support after a week, feeling that she had been saved from a life without all of her grandchildren. The designated morning, someone brought Uncle Mike up to the hospital and wheeled him into the room. His face was powdered white with what Granddaddy had called Coca-Cola, and though Leslie had tried to wipe it all off, enough had made it up his nose and into his mouth so that, while relatives shuffled in and out to say their final goodbyes to Nana, he went between crying out, “She’s a saint, my mother, a saint!” and slapping the backsides of nurses and asking for their phone numbers, until some family member drove him home, to the Back House at Nana’s. It was hard to chastise him then. Nobody was in the mood, and he had lost doubly. Before Mike could be notified of Chris’s death a week earlier, someone had posted the news online. Small towns and all that. An EMT or his parole officer knew someone who knew someone who couldn’t keep their mouth shut, and Mom saw the news of her nephew’s death on a social media page. On the way to Myrtle Beach from Nashville, Dad called Mike to see how his older brother was taking the blow, only to find out that nobody had bothered to tell him yet, that he had in fact broken the news, driving several highway exits’ length of confused silence that erupted into his brother’s wailing. Mike began planning an elaborate funeral for his son, to whom he hadn’t spoken in several years, not since Chris had walked into the Back House and stolen the television off the wall. Mike called everyone he knew and those he used to know in Myrtle Beach to invite them to a gaudy and expensive funeral service he arranged. Within just a few hours, he had put out an announcement in the newspaper, ordered thousands of dollars’ of flowers, and had Chris’s body transferred from Florence, where he’d been paroled from jail for the holiday and had been staying with his mother, all without her notice. Chris’s mom called up Uncle Leslie in as calm a state as a grieving mother could manage, wondering what we were doing transferring her son’s body to Myrtle Beach and planning a service without her, filled with people Chris hated in a place that drove him to the needle? And not knowing anything about it, Les could only apologize and call the funeral home to have Chris’s body sent back to his mother. I would never have predicted that Chris would be the one who wandered up and down the Grand Strand after death.

  After Mike was driven back to Nana’s house, Leslie let go. “If I thought that I could get away with it, I’d dump Mike off the end of Myrtle Beach Pier. Good Lord, I think he might outlive us all.” He sat down next to the window that overlooked the parking lot of Myrtle Beach Hospital, where he and Dad waited for their own granddaddy Harvey to die decades before.

  “Damn, ain’t it the truth. In that case, I might just throw Mike and his wheelchair in the back of my truck and drop him off at your house on my way out of town,” Dad said.

  “You do that and I’m gonna come back and haunt you,” Les returned, a
nd we all laughed, nobody saying but everybody smiling at the strange twist in their story. Mike and Granddaddy would be stuck sharing a roof alone. “It’ll be a ghost town over there without Jackie,” Les continued, trying to fill the silence. Except for the con men and charlatans pitching their latest scheme to Granddaddy, who didn’t realize that he no longer controlled his finances, it will be, I think.

  When it felt as if we were in her living room, telling stories with her rocking in her recliner, Nana let go a final ragged breath and her heart stopped for the last time surrounded by the voices and stories of her making. She was eased out of the world on a morphine drip, nearly the same as Chris had been. Mingled with our grief over Nana was renewed anger at Granddaddy. Though Nana tried to give Chris love and stability, with Granddaddy’s strange and sad hatred directed at him, it is no wonder that my cousin chose the muggy, vengeful bliss of one drug and then another until he became a heroin addict. “She deserved better,” Les said finally, before walking down to the parking lot, where my brothers and cousin Ralph Howard waited, not wanting to be in the room. Soon enough everybody else was in their cars. Heads on steering wheels, hands on packs of cigarettes, faces wet. As I am in charge of the story now, I record here for the future to note that none of us returned to the parking lot of Myrtle Beach Hospital ever again. We went back to Nana’s house, where we, like children again, snuck into her old bedroom, and each chose one of the enameled lockets of perfume she collected. Standing in a circle, we held them aloft, my brothers, cousins, and I, and summoned her memory and the memory of the cousin who was missing as the scent of her surrounded us, connecting us not to any cartoon superhero as we had pretended and practiced, but to her spirit.

  Nana’s favorite Bible verse was the one about the virtuous wife. Her worth is far above rubies, and her husband shall never want. Just as I wonder sometimes if she finally snapped and pushed Granddaddy down to open up his head those years ago, I wonder if knowing these lines would be read to Granddaddy over her body was a slice of revenge on a husband who was far less virtuous. Only once did she ever express her anger over any part of her marriage in front of her grandchildren. Ralph Howard had driven with Jared and Jason to pick Nana up from her house, so that she could spend a day down in Murrells Inlet with us. They were backing out of her driveway and saw a car narrowly miss a pedestrian when she said, “You know, one day I saw that woman F coming out of the store, while I was waitin’ for a parkin’ space, and I had the urge to hit the gas pedal and run her down,” as my brothers openmouthed and wide-eyed turned to look at each other, as if to cheer her on. “I don’t like to hate anybody, but I sure as the devil hate her.” She let it drop there, perhaps embarrassed at expressing a lifetime of stifled rage. Instead of silence or shock, the boys told her that they would have understood and held her blameless if she had run over her rival. I watched them all fall out of the car in loving laughter, my brothers and cousin lifting her from the car and up to the porch to watch the ocean for what would be the last time in life. It was quite a scene, three young men holding on their shoulders a glamorous blonde in movie-star sunglasses in a wheelchair, as if supporting a gilded palanquin in humble supplication.

  She’d been sleeping in the Doll Room for years, kicked out of the marital bed. After the memorial service, I went in wondering if I’d hear her there, as I had unexpectedly heard my grandpa’s voice. The blankets on one side of the bed were pulled back, where she’d stood up from sleep for the last time, and the other was covered with piles of her romance novels, where a lover might have lain. “I know you’re not real girly,” her words came to mind, but I knew they were remembered, not heard. “I don’t know what you’ll do with all these dolls.” The doll collection remains as it ever was, encased in glass and untouched. I still don’t know what to do with them, as she predicted, these emblems of her imagination, tokens of freedom, of other lives she could have lived had she been allowed. What would my voice sound like without her to direct the compass of my drawl? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I wouldn’t hear her voice calling to me as Grandpa’s had. In the only dream I have had of her since she died, she is sitting on her couch in her house, next to her sister, Sue, and across from their mother, May Ella. Bathed in light, they are all young and happily chatting as they did in life from those very spots. As I was sure my grandpa had died with the unfinished business of some ghosts, I knew Nana had done what she set out to do in life. She’d made her grandchildren love her better than anything. She deserved better, but she gave away the best of anything she ever got.

  A notebook filled with lifetimes of my family’s stories was stolen from my car in a parking lot before Nana’s death, and for months, I could not look at the white of paper without feeling her leave me again. She was the keeper of family stories. “I’m the matriarch,” she asserted with a defiant pride, sure of her place at the head of a family that had belittled not just her, but all of its women, as if willing a world of women with power. Men have always been credited with the stories women kept alive. In returning to this place I had let go of, I would make her ghost not a lovesick or angry one as I’d learned the ghosts of women to be, but as the loving beacon I knew in life. What healers and psychics could not bring back after my first real experience with grief, I must do for myself.

  Here, for the last time, I must take back my words. It is all more complicated than that. How can I heal all these women, my kith and kin, these mothers and grandmothers, much less myself, when I see now that I have been living out their eternal fates as if a ghost myself even as I try to write them into freer lives after death? I am little Julia Legare, who nightly forces open the doors between death and memory. I am the Lady in White, who plunges over and over into ocean waves to save not one body but generations under full moons reflected up and down the coast. Like Alice Flagg of the Hermitage I wear a gold ring on a chain around my neck to keep close the love of someone gone. With a silent clasp, on the morning of New Year’s Day, I hooked one circle through another and walked once more across King’s Highway from Nana’s House, over Ocean Boulevard, beyond the boardwalk to the beach where I looked and looked until I found her between the dunes wearing on her finger the ring that I had around my neck.

  Every Sunday, Nana told me that she wished she could follow me around for a day, to see what my life living somewhere else was like. One Sunday when Jared happened to be visiting her, we turned our phones on to video chat, and I walked her through my apartment, around my neighborhood, past subway entrances, doing laps around the park, telling her about my days in the city, how I had been apple picking the day before. “Ain’t it a miracle,” she declared, and at first, I thought she meant the technology.

  If only I had the same skill with time as Grandpa, who could catch and move its hands at will over clock faces. Nana used to sneak barefoot to the clock, her mother’s wedding present, on their family’s mantel and wind back the hands to give her and her sister a little more time to play under the moon. If only I could reclaim the superstitions and stories passed on to me from fear and remake them as I would see the daughters of the Low Country. As free to be, to come and go, as they are to breathe. I could befriend the ghosts that wander the highway or find themselves lingering on the beach.

  On the drive to the airport leaving one last time, I passed the oaks that hide the rice and indigo plantations now covered in sculpture and fairy lights in the shape of butterflies. The site where my great-grandmother ran her gambling parlor out of the gas station. The water park where my brothers and cousins and I splashed and warred with runes painted in neon zinc across our cheeks. The seafood joints, the motels and hotels, the lazy rivers and mini-golf courses. The vacant lot where the Pavilion used to stand before it was torn down for no good reason. The road that turns off King’s Highway and leads to the swing bridge in Socastee. I think of my nana’s favorite way to say goodbye as we reach the cemetery where we buried her yesterday, or a lifetime ago, under the name that is hers and mine. See you later, alligator, she liked to
say with a wave in a lilting invitation for me to finish. Instead of holding my breath, I breathe her in and remember. After ’while, crocodile.

  Acknowledgments

  _______________________________

  THANK YOU TO MY EDITOR, MEGHA MAJUMDAR, whose brilliance, grace, and generosity continue to amaze and humble. For the time and care you’ve put into this work, I will never be able to thank you enough. Here I will try once more, with deepest love: thank you.

  Thank you to Catapult and the most wonderful team: Robin Billardello, Nicole Caputo, Wah-Ming Chang, Jordan Koluch, Alisha Gorder, Megan Fishmann, Rachel Fershleiser, Katie Boland, Samm Saxby, Laura Gonzalez, Dustin Kurtz. Your support and work on this book has meant the world.

  Endless gratitude and love to my agent, Stephanie Delman, who reached out just as I was ready to give up. Your encouragement and belief in the vision I had for this book kept me going, and I am marvelously lucky to know you and to have you on my team. For anyone on the verge of giving up, keep going.

  Thank you to my family, especially to Mom and Dad for your love and generosity—much of this book was written at a folding table in their storage closet. Thank you to Uncle Leslie and Robyn for all of your love and support, for the telling and retelling of family stories, for help with research. Thank you to my brothers: Justin, Jason, and Jared. My gratitude to Joanne Gaines for the love, care, and devotion to my nana over her lifetime.