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

emerges here villainous cannot be helped. The advantages of femininity are few in Horry County, and I didn’t question when graces fell instead of his blows. Perhaps he didn’t know how to handle a girl child—weren’t our bodies supposed to be more delicate? Our worth as the bearers of sons to be preserved?—and I watched my brothers and our first cousins, as good as more brothers, get a belt across their backs every evening when he came home from his office. A belting was a regular part of the day, and we, as children aware only of what we could count on, took such strikes for granted, as normal as afternoon thunderstorms or breakfast cereal, which didn’t mean the hurt wasn’t adding up. We were too young to know what to do with the rage that bloomed under bruises. The first time I saw Granddaddy slap Nana across the face, at four or five, I knew that I hated him, but did not yet know how this baptismal spark of anger bonded us, how it would make me like him, and how it had done the same to my dad. As passively as catching a cold, his disease was activated in my blood, which was partly his, after all.

By the time they were in elementary school, Dad and his brothers were experienced busboys at any number of restaurants along King’s Highway. Alcohol was halfway illegal in the 1960s in South Carolina and not allowed served in restaurants, but Uncle Leslie recalls making drinks at a bar hidden in the kitchen of the Hawaiian Village. This tropical-themed restaurant-resort on Highway 17 and Thirty-ninth Avenue was managed by Uncle Jack and owned then by his eldest brother, Keith. Guests were invited to “lose your worries in a carefree Polynesian atmosphere,” part of which was the waitresses in grass skirts and coconut bras. The Myrtle Beach police were said to let Keith and Jack know that a raid was on the books for the Hawaiian Village and that they should expect half a dozen men in uniforms ironed neatly and badges shining. After finding only the Coca-Cola and tap water of good Christians on the floor, these men supposedly placed their own drink orders. Waiting in the kitchen were their mai tais and gin fizzes, handed out by only the prettiest waitresses.

Uncle Jack married the best-looking waitress they had at the Hawaiian Village. Betty was tall with unruly curls as black as Jack’s. That she could hold Jack’s attention was saying something, especially in the Bora Bora room, where hula dancers wearing orchid crowns blew kisses from the stage and shirtless men threw firesticks to one another in streamers of orange afterglow. The night Jack met Betty, Dad and Uncle Leslie were restocking the bar and cleaning tables as if it were any other night, until a guest pulled a gun out of his suit jacket and held it over the room. Dad remembers ducking under a table with an armful of dirty dishes.

“Why’d you go and marry a woman who’s gonna talk back to you?” the Jones brothers queried their baby brother, fearing that Aunt Betty’s unladylike demands, like fidelity and daughters, might influence their own wives’ expectations. Their wives did what a good wife was supposed to do, which is what she was told. Betty was not afraid to interfere, and spoke her mind to all the Jones brothers. When Nana dared talk back to Granddaddy, the best that could happen would be a low rumble, “You’ve been around Betty, I can tell.” Jack and Betty let my dad move in with them as a teenager, after he couldn’t live with his father anymore and took off. Uncle Jack saw something of himself in my dad, another youngest son with the instinct natural performers have for getting away with things on a cocktail of charm and indifference. He saw the bruises, too. Born nearly a decade later than the rest of his five brothers, Jack managed to escape his father’s temper and could give some safety to his nephew. It only takes the faith of one person to bring about a little peace. “My daddy’d let his sons starve before he’d give away a nickel,” Dad has said over and over.

When it was time for Dad to move out of Jack and Betty’s place, his brothers Mike and Leslie, blond and blue-eyed like Nana, welcomed their dark-headed baby brother, along with his guitar and his shaggy mutt, into their condo on Ocean Boulevard and Thirty-third Avenue. Dad has always connected to dogs easily and with authority, as wounded animals who recognize each other. Stray dogs would follow him home from school as a boy, and when Dad struck up a particular friendship with one and tried to keep it in the backyard, instead of “good night” or “sleep well,” never mind bedtime-story forts, Granddaddy would say as he fell asleep, “I’m gonna kill that dog in the morning.” Dad got up early enough as a busboy for breakfast crowds even during the school year to hide his pets at first light, saving scraps of tourists’ bacon and pancakes to feed them. Not a penny of the household money was allowed on dog food, until Nana, in a burst of either defiance or loneliness, brought home the first in a series of tiny teacup poodles.

Dad acquired Ghost serendipitously and by accident, when a dog leapt into the car through the open passenger door. He was big enough to fill the whole seat, and they couldn’t entice him to jump out. Leaving the windows down, Dad said, “If he’s still in the car when we get back, I’m keeping him.” He was and so earned his name for materializing out of thin air.

As this was in Columbia, the state capital, they would not have been far from the swamp chestnut trees and old-growth cherrybark oaks of the piedmont where some say resides the ghost of a black, shaggy dog just known as the