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

things left behind. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, and there I was sitting at a round plastic table with Mom counting out foot-tall stacks of cash and taking an inventory of guns and jewels. It was as if a pirate’s treasure chest had exploded. In silence, we counted out close to fifty thousand dollars and tallied up watches and diamond rings and rifles and Glocks. I heard my name spoken so clearly in his voice that I knocked my stack of bills to the floor in shock, jerking around expecting to meet his gaze. I heard his voice as clearly as I heard the footsteps of Harvey.

I felt alone with a grief heavy and new, adrift without his reassurances that I belonged wherever I chose. Without the blessing of belief and the reassurance of his experience, I could not strip the old feeling that I wore a costume. Dressed up to match the fellow commuters on crowded subways, the cloak of an educated professional was one I wore willingly and more easily than sequins and plastic tiaras. If I was not quite free of family patterns or ghosts from a region whose values I considered backward even before I realized it, no officer of the law of men could force me to turn around and return to a life of captivity. Friends encouraged me to have more fun and to forget after I abandoned them at bars without warning when I thought again that I had heard his voice saying my name and had to excuse myself mid-conversation. Was he calling to me from wherever he had traveled, or were the well-trodden footpaths of habit traced across my memory in our daily conversations simply starting to grow over unused? Would they stop if I painted my ceiling blue, and would I want them to? One forgettable day, they stopped.

With money that Mom inherited from Grandpa, she and Dad bought a farm near Nashville that they have filled with rescue llamas. Grandpa after death had blessed Mom with what she wanted back most, which was her marriage. Dad came to the funeral and has never strayed from her since. It’s a red-stained log cabin, the Llama Farm my parents call it, with a baby grand piano and a wide porch on forty rolling acres. They let a neighbor graze his cows and horses on their land, and it feels there as if time moves slower and the heartbeat tremolos of Carolina wrens duet just as they did in Nana’s backyard. There’s only one llama left living now, down from six when they first started. Black snakes sun in zigzags over the wooden fence, and a couple of circus ponies are picked on by the horses. Old Conway died, but they now have two new dogs, Waylon and Loretta. The first spring they had the place, Dad found himself at midnight driving to his office in Nashville. It was burning down. On the news the next day, I watched firefighters in yellow hats and yellow coats hand Dad his guitars and songbooks as the flames danced around them in the porch until the sun came up. That’s the thing about fire. It sucks up all the air in fantasies.

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