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

bodies. The yellow speckled necks of snapping turtles were given a reprieve by so many carpooling mothers that a permanent ban was issued declaring NO VACANCY in the classroom aquariums. At the risk of provoking tempers unknown, I advise travelers to leave them be on the side of the road, or to push them into a ditch with the longest nearby stick. They’ve been known to bite off fingertips, and I have watched one of these little dinosaurs eat a fuzzy duckling whole. The sea turtles of our fair coast, on the other hand, emerge gentle and lovely from the cool cover of quartzy moonlit sand to be lapped up by the high tide. As such, they are state-protected tourist attractions, bumper-sticker symbols of pride, and interference earns a hefty fine or jail time.

I spent at least one afternoon a week on the reptile-friendly football field not for love of sport or school spirit, but because bomb threats were called in regularly by bored or ill-prepared students. I have a memory of poking with the end of a fallen brown pine needle the pink wide-open mouth of a Venus flytrap while I waited to be led back to class. Stalking patches of brighter green in the soft soggy grass. The sticky shine of its body unhinged to a summery pink that recalled the sweetness of watermelon and the scent of powdered cubes of bubble gum. And then the surrounding fringe of teeth sharp and thin to cage its meals, or in the case of my memory, closing calm and slow around the tip of pine needles. Here is probably my chance to note that this carnivorous plant, a strange hybrid rare and beautiful, grows only in the swamplands that bridge the border of the Carolinas. If the observations of Ayllón were published in a slim edition alongside those of more famous explorers, would these plants appear as monsters or wonders? Would he have exaggerated their size so that grown men were seen eaten alive by swamp monsters in pages presented to European kings? Looking at its insides so freely offered, I thought then that it looked not monstrous, but like a valentine cut out from stiff construction paper.

Waiting for the police or fire department to declare the school safe, the whole school stood and looked out into the pine and cypress at the edges of the field. Floating between the tiers of tree limbs, glowing lights are commonly observed in these swamps. Swamp gas and fox fire are the explanations. Those for whom bioluminescence is not magical enough claim one ghost story or another, depending on what suits them. There are the Bingham Lights in Dillon. The Land’s End Lights in Beaufort. Lights of the Old Hanging Tree, from which the eyes of murdered enslaved people do not sleep. Headless soldiers in uniforms blue and gray hold lights aloft, looking for their lost heads. A region in search of reasons for the violence of its past, not ready to give up its ghosts and the guilt that brings them ever back to life. The only orbs of light I can report seeing are the Fourth of July fireworks shot up from the community college next to the Witch Links golf course in Conway. Dad would pile us into the bed of his pickup truck, the one Uncle Jack ran off the road and the one Hank Williams Jr. sings about, with folding beach chairs of woven plastic strips and rusty legs. Our family watched the fireworks pop and sizzle, under the sulfurous spell of gunpowder and a bucket of fried chicken picked up along the way. “Y’all, pile in,” Dad said, directing us to jump into the back of the truck with the dog and ride with him down to the bait shop to get cigarettes and candy. On the way back home, I’d rest my chin on the edge of the truck next to Bandit’s, and the wind blew his long, muddy hair into mine. Dad and Leslie managed to find houses just down the street from each other, like Nana and Sue thirty years before them, and the boys and I played with Leslie’s son, Ralph Howard, as another brother. Mom baked pies from blackberries we picked with purple-stained fingertips, our toes as far away from the snaky bramble as possible, as Dad wrote love songs from the couch or a makeshift desk in the garage where the King took it all in. On a bitter cold night many years later, at a bar in New York, Dad confessed that those were the happiest days of his life, and I must concur that it was an idyllic time until it wasn’t.

The longest I’ve ever lived in one place is still that little, love-filled house in Conway. The spot where we watched fireworks every July is now a fully developed suburb of strip malls, home to vape shops and tattoo parlors and revolving-door apartment complexes of the newly divorced and the new to town. Conway is, like Little River to the north, one of the older outposts in Horry County and far more historical than the newer Myrtle Beach, which was called New Town until 1900, when a contest was held among the county’s turpentine laborers and socialites. The wife of the nearest railroad baron, one Mrs. Burroughs, suggested the winning pick. Imagine that. The wax myrtle bushes that fringed the beach’s dunes are rarer now, pulled up for hotel development. I thought for a while as a kid that the whole town was named for the crape myrtle trees in my nana’s backyard. They flowered always, no matter the season, which I know is not their usual pattern, but I must ask for your trust when I say that on any day of the year, when you creaked open the wooden door painted a glossy, chipping beige, swishes of hot pink twirled at your ears and danced at your heels to lie finally underfoot as you followed the