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

jangly songs of vacation and escape in place of the country choruses. He’d put his own music down for the longest period I’d seen him in the three years between the wreck and Jared’s birth, questioning whether it was even worth it to try any longer. The guitar remained in its case in a closet. Together on the porch, he taught us the words to Beach Boys songs about other beachy islands. We never harmonized as well as he tried to teach us, but we defied gravity in our own way that first night. This is the point in the story before our characters make a decision, for good or for bad, the dreamy hit of nicotine inhaled and held inside before breathing out things you can’t take back once released. It was this summer in Cherry Grove that I disappeared a little more fully into the sanctuary of imagination that springs from the space between pages, where I visited stories for their safety, their reliability, as I saw Nana escape into the sanctuary of her books.

I was taught in history class about Theodosia Burr, the placidly beautiful daughter of Aaron Burr who was lost at sea during a storm off Cape Hatteras. That, at least, is the commonsense theory, though she and her ship may well have been captured by pirates, and the passengers forced to walk the plank. Some say she’s been walking the shore a few counties up, looking for her treasure, which was also given to the ocean. Brookgreen Gardens tries to claim her ghost, saying she walks among the statues near her husband’s grave, but I don’t buy it. Perhaps I shied away from Theodosia because embedded in stories about her tragic death was the subtle spin that she brought it on herself, the same as Alice did. Are the legends of her mysterious fate imposed on her as some sort of punishment? She was one of the few educated women of her time. Her father, before gunning down Alexander Hamilton, figured Theodosia worthy of schooling, and she was the first educated woman I had heard of. A New Yorker, no less, who was still deemed worthy of a Southern ghost story. In a townhouse in Greenwich Village, she read her Greek and hosted parties and married a man, the future governor of South Carolina, who valued her knowledge at least as much as any other offerings of marriage. Was it the ocean taking revenge on an unnaturally educated woman when it pulled her and her ship down? More likely the kneading of history by men. This is what happened to women who didn’t know their place. Who had a fancy New York education and thought themselves as valuable as their husbands, and who let them know it, to boot. They walked the plank and were eaten alive by sharks in the cold dark sea. If pirates managed to overtake her ship, I like to think of either Anne Bonney or Mary Read stepping on board to loot and pillage, recognizing Theodosia as another mouthy, ambitious woman and hitting it off. I could feel the crystals of salt clinging to my tangled and windswept hair, the metal of a dagger cool as rain strapped to my ankle, and the weight of a blade on my hip. How close the sour tang of marsh air. The fire-crackle snaps of thousands of pistol shrimp in the mud as the flames of sunrise seep from horizon into land. Maybe we could all take tea together before sailing off to an imagined land where their dispositions were not punishable, by noose or plank.

Sometimes Dad took me to the Cherry Grove pier to fish or to the beach for rounds of catch with baseballs sometimes landing in the waves. For hours, we’d throw back and forth until his instructions fell into silence. It was an uneasy time for all of us, and I remember very little of Mom then. Perhaps she was busy taking care of Jared, who turned a year old that summer. As I was nine when he was born, I feel half his sibling and half his guardian. I remember feeding him and the foul smell of formula, rocking him to sleep, holding up his fat wrists as he took first steps. I was the oldest and only girl. The boys were not going to be asked to babysit, I knew by then. They were as free to roam and loiter as they always were, bringing home sunburned shoulders and hermit crabs collected on the beach or bought at a strip mall. Jared rode my own kid-narrow hips as much as Mom’s. Through the bond of attention or the gamble of genes, he has grown up the most like me, and the good folks of South Carolina, well-meaning, have asked if we are not identical twins.

He was a good baby, his teeth the only sign of the months he spent in the hospital instead of our home. They came in rotted away through the middle in tiny arches and sharp as razor blades on their ends. The older boys and I thought it was funny to teach him to bite the others, until our own blood was drawn. I remember him crying only once. Mom had been crying about something I could feel and nothing she’d say, after driving around with me and Jared, driving home from Nana’s perhaps. She pulled into the parking lot of Belk, the local department store, and said she’d be back in a minute. Of course, I whined for her not to go, it was dark and late and, in my memory, pouring rain. After a few minutes turned into ten and then twenty and more, Jared shrieked inconsolably. His screams, so loud from such a tiny thing, burned in the darkness, squalls pounded our minivan, and suddenly I was begging God and Jesus above to please help. I did not know what to do. Wrapped inside the veil of wan streetlight,