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

down the back window and let the dog stick his bear-size head over the side of the car. The cop would usually jump back and shout, “Shit, Mister. You got a grizzly in your truck?” And Dad would plead, “Officer, you gotta let me back on the road. I got a certified water rescue dog and we’re on our way to save somebody.” It wasn’t that much of a lie. Conway had rescued him. All the while, down South there is, as there has always been, fightin’ and fussin’, kissin’ and makin’ up, kept secret from Grandpa and half-hidden from me and my brothers. Dad’s visits to Charlotte are infrequent but the pattern remains unchanged: his truck pulls into my mother’s driveway for days or weeks, only to disappear in the middle of the night without a word of parting.

After a period of steady Bluebird round-robin nights and Mom bailing him out of jail for a variety of violations, just enough to give him that outlaw finish, he got an invitation to come see one of the most renowned publishing houses on Music Row. He and Conway were living in his truck at the time. He pulled into the office’s parking lot, behind the quaint-looking Victorian converted house. Unshaven and hungover, he stripped down to his underwear in the parking lot to change into a better outfit. The secretary watched from behind pulled-back curtains as he pulled on his boots with the fanged snakes’ heads on the toes, and she nearly wouldn’t let him in the door. The publisher led him into a conference room with a long table in the middle and walls of guitars. He’d left his guitar in the truck and asked to borrow one off the wall, and started playing and couldn’t stop. He played that guitar all afternoon and into the night, channeling the spirits it contained, not once getting up from the conference table. The publisher wouldn’t let him leave without signing a contract, and I wonder if Dad thought about all those times Uncle Jack had held him hostage, too, as all day and all night he played his own songs on the guitar that wrote songs for Patsy Cline and “Take This Job and Shove It.” The next morning, he left with a signed publishing contract and a promise to set him up to write with any writer he’d ever admired. Dad has made it through the door, and his house has yet to burn down. What a weight lifted from a back bent low when you are recognized for what you know you are supposed to do. When he used to say that Conway was famous in Nashville, he was saying that he was, and that when the publishing house hosted his fiftieth birthday a few years later, after writing and selling a string of hits, the publisher took down an urn from the mantel at the office on Music Row, stuck a finger into the ashes of a country-music legend, and drew a cross across my dad’s forehead, a baptism that turned him into what he knew he was all along.

Let’s take a breath on a moment of triumph. We will soon need our strength and must bask in the restorative powers of victory. Like pushpins in a hurricane map, I have left wobbling pins charting a path out of the South altogether, to study books and writing in New York.

One stormy spring about a decade later, when a new complex called the Swamp Fox Entertainment Complex stood where the Amphitheater would have, I walked down a wide, leafy Brooklyn block, skyscraper steel and brownstone separating me from a past that seemed a world away, when Mom called to say there had been an accident at Nana’s house. Granddaddy had fallen some days ago and had either forgotten about his concussion and scalp cut wide open, or kept his injuries a secret. By the time Leslie happened to stop by and find his father also at home, he couldn’t remember who he was even though he was driving back and forth between Nana’s house and his office. He fell unconscious in the ambulance up to Myrtle Beach Hospital. When could I fly down?

Granddaddy had become obsessed with regaining his fortune since the Amphitheater, and had once even asked for my Social Security and bank account numbers. He knew a guy who could double whatever was in it. I held his hand and smiled while not knowing what to do, seeing him as not only the tyrant of my childhood, but newly as a frail old man desperate to recover his self-worth, which was always in his money. That was the most plausible of his get-rich quick schemes. Where he found them is still a mystery. There was the emerald mine in Italy that needed investors to free hostage jewels owned by the pope. A man from Texas had invented a machine that cures cancer and kept it on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, he just needed a little money because the government had covered it up and was after him, though it was a sure investment. Then there was the earthworm farm, which he could not explain properly but still elicits wide eyes and head shakes. The car that runs on sand instead of gasoline. In a newfound spirit of generosity, a sign of his declining mental state, he was trying to spread the wealth and get us to invest, too.

Dad picked me up from the airport, and on the ride to Myrtle Beach Hospital, tried to prepare me for how bad Granddaddy was. How he walked around for days with such a head injury was both strange and bad for the prognosis. They’d had to remove a part of his skull to ease the pressure on his swollen brain. In the hospital parking lot, the same one where he and Les waited for their granddaddy to die, he pulled out a CD from the console