Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

few hours. They were married at the courthouse and spent their wedding night in Nana’s office at the local bank, South Carolina National, where she was a bank teller and a bookkeeper. She had some numbers to finish before they could enjoy any celebrations. Now maybe it is perhaps more apparent why Nana’s mom, May Ella, thought of him more as a horse thief than a son-in-law. Mike was born while Granddaddy was stationed in San Diego with the Navy, where he discovered not a love of the sea, but a talent for boxing. He even won the Golden Gloves competition in the flyweight division. A local newspaper described him as “scrappy.” I have never seen Granddaddy on the beach, despite his milking its charms for his bottom line. He may be the only person in Myrtle Beach who never bothers to consult with the ocean. When he came home, he put all of his energy into throwing punches at his family. “Come look at these photographs of your granddaddy,” Nana has begged often. A scrapbook of his boxing days sits where it always has on a shelf of photo albums. She seems proud of him, and I wonder if that is her defense of what she knows we have seen. “If it is enough for me to put up with, then can’t nobody say it’s too much,” she may as well have said.

There is no denying that Mike has alternatively been called both a fuckup and a genius. When his number came up during Vietnam, as Granddaddy hoped it would, I am sure, he didn’t pass the physical. He had been born deaf in one ear, the Army doctor said, and he danced up and down the bus on the way back to town from the base. “Your number got called up?” he asked the grim-faced teenage boys in their new uniforms returning to Myrtle Beach on the bus from Conway. “Why don’t you give me your girlfriend’s number since I’m gonna be staying here,” he’d recount to me and the boys before we knew what Vietnam was. He was the first of the brothers to divorce, still a semi-scandal back in 1990 South Carolina. Though Mike’s two sons would have been better off with their mother, Granddaddy is said to have had words with the judge seeing to custody matters. Mike got both boys full-time. What backwoods Southern judge didn’t regard tribal masculinity as justice of the first order? Granddaddy didn’t care a lick about my cousins, Chris and Brian, but they were property like any other that he knew how to take. Fairness, like compassion, belongs to the fantasies of women. Mike moved into the Back House, and Chris and Brian moved into Nana’s house, where, in front of the rest of us, Granddaddy let loose on my two little cousins for no reason other than they were Mike’s. The only salve for this renewed generational trauma was the tender attentions of Nana.

Often when the boys and I were at Nana’s, Mike offered us each a few bucks to clean the Back House for him. This usually meant that he was expecting a date. He’d herd us all into the one-bedroom house beside the carport, promise us a dollar or two, and leave again in a disheveled frenzy. I was seven when he moved in back there, so my brothers and cousins were a year to a few years younger, and we were all young enough to feel like we had to do what he told us to do, while also knowing fully that Mike, as he had no authority over anything, really had none over us. We made a show of tidying up at first, and once alone, covered the walls and refrigerators with stickers and drawings. We went through his drawers and shelves, of course, pocketing any cash or coins that we knew from experience he’d never pay us after promising a going rate. Inevitably one of us would come across assorted tablets and bags of powder in between couch cushions and next to ashtrays, and we knew somehow that it was what was called “drugs,” without quite grasping exactly what that was.

I was living in a northern city after college, working at a bookstore and tinkering for the first time with writing my own stories, still fantasies about living abroad, of Sardinian summers and wine-dark seas, or monastic peace on Himalayan mountaintops, when I was summoned to Myrtle Beach. Mike had had a stroke. In fact, he’d had several and was laid up at Myrtle Beach Hospital, unable to move or speak. By that time, he lived alone on the inland side of the Waterway on the way to Socastee. After the first stroke, he’d fallen between his bed and a wall, unable to get up or call for help. Nobody found him for days, and Mike had another series of strokes. Leslie and a cousin found him, after Nana called up both of them saying, “I want y’all to go check on Mike.” It was unusual that he would go so long without asking her for money or favors.

After Granddaddy joined the rest of the family at Nana’s house, the doctor called him up with an update on the condition of his eldest son. I watched him go from his typical “Howdy, howdy” on the phone with a fellow member of the Horry County Boys’ Club to fuming in the space of a breath. Mike’s blood-test results showed an array of unnatural substances in the blood. His strokes were no longer a temptation to pity the bad luck of his firstborn, but cause to double down on his bitter hatred. Granddaddy, always so angry and ashamed of his son, couldn’t contain his wrath, but with a glance at me adjusted his anger. I had assumed he had wanted to spare my ladylike sensibilities, which would surely be shocked to hear the word cocaine, as if I had not been picking up little plastic