by Bret Lott
I let out a hard breath, edged up on it something like a cry for how sharp had been in me that feeling in my chest, the pressing down and pushing out. Not long ago I’d been sitting in that chair, watching golf balls go places I wouldn’t go, being pissy about Unc and his life now, pondering the architecture at Stanford. And thinking about Tabitha.
But that was then.
I turned, headed for the dark line of trees past those kidney bunkers and the thirteenth green I could barely see up ahead for how dark it was. Those trees, the avenue of live oak leading to the original plantation house—planted by Landgrave Elliot himself in 1679—bordered the eleventh fairway. From there I’d have to walk that hole’s length, then cross the tenth, make it past the clubhouse without setting off the motion sensor on the floodlights all over it, next head on through the ninth and eighth, careful all the while to steer clear of the couple dozen houses sprinkled everywhere out here. Then I’d be at the seventh, where at the far end, just off the left-hand side of the green and looking out on Goose Creek toward the Cooper River, was our cottage.
Our home. Or at least where we wrong elements—my mom, Unc, and me—all lived.
More days than I care to count I miss the old house on Marie, back before we ever lived here, and even farther back, even before all of what’d happened out to Hungry Neck so long ago. Too many times since Unc, Mom, and I had gotten here I was sorry I wasn’t a kid anymore and hanging out with my old high school cohorts Matt and Jessup and Rafael, LaKeisha and Polly and Deevonne, us there on the tracks beside the Mark Clark high up on its concrete pilings, enjoying ourselves for no better reason than parking our butts on the railroad tracks. We’d sit and pass around Colt 45s and talk about teachers and who we liked and didn’t, about grades and how we didn’t care or did, about what shits other people were, ourselves included. We were black and white, stupid and smart, good grades and bad grades. We were just us.
But the idiot thing was that back then I couldn’t wait to get out of there, that house where it was just my mom and me living, counting out the days until whatever would come of our lives would come.
Back when I thought Unc was my uncle, raised my whole life to call him Unc and to think of him that way and that way only, what I’d always thought my real daddy a man who ran off after Unc had been nearly killed in the fire.
Mom and Dad had lived out there in the trailer when I was little, Dad the one to run the hunt club, and when Unc’s house burned down in Mount Pleasant, Mom and Dad had no choice but to take him in, to nurse him back. And where Dad would have to face, as I wouldn’t find out until I was fifteen, the fact of what Unc and Mom had done, the news of my real patronage nothing my dad hadn’t known. But which he’d chosen to ignore, until, finally, he’d taken off one morning, and all that’d been left was Unc, and Mom, and me.
Unc: that was his name until I was fifteen and found out he was my father, and the name I’d be using for the rest of my life. Trying to call him Dad or Pop or anything remotely close to those sounded wrong. Because he was and always will be Unc. Plain and simple.
And though it might seem logical that once the divorce was over, me just a kid still and wondering why my dad had left, that Mom and Unc would hook up, they never married, and never carried on anything between them, either. Unc’d loved his dead wife, Sarah, just too much, and Mom’d put too many years into trying to make up to my dad for the mistake she’d made with Unc—a mistake that’d resulted with me.
But she never made me feel as such my whole life long. Sure, she was the first one to give me hell for sneaking in and out of my bedroom window at night, and the first one to sit me down to study harder if my grades even fell a hair below straight A’s. But she loved me, and I always knew it. Always.
Not but six months after Unc’d healed from the burns that blinded him, Mom moved the two of us to North Charleston, to the house on Marie. She went to Trident Tech and became an LPN, later on an RN. We set up our lives there, and I started in to meeting the friends I did, and discovering the tracks at the end of the street and the fine diversion they could be from the life I was living.
We had a house she was providing us with, and we had food on the table. Each afternoon she wasn’t on shift at the hospital, she met me at the foot of our oil-stained driveway, me fresh off the block-and-a-half walk from the bus stop, and despite how embarrassed I might have been for fear of someone seeing us, she’d hug me hard, and ask after my day, walk me into the house. Every time.
Yet all I’d wanted was to live out to Hungry Neck, and Hungry Neck only. Unc had stayed out there in that trailer, and’d taken over running the hunt club despite his being blind. With the help of Miss Dinah Galliard, the woman who, with her daughter, Tabitha, cooked for the members of the club each Saturday hunt, the whole operation worked just fine.
Because Unc knew the land, knew it better even, I came to understand, than my dad had: he knew by smell how far off the creeks we were, knew by where I pointed his arm out toward a star at night where we were too. He knew where the two-track roads went to muck when the highest tides were in, and knew by the tick the tide made on its way out how far to throw a cast net for mullet. He knew, and knew.
Mom and I went out there every weekend those first few years—we were a family of sorts, after all—and then, once I’d gotten my learner’s permit, it was nothing for her to let me drive out there alone and tend to him, and to help with the tract out there, the blue bloods who showed up in the fall for deer hunting season, and turkey in the spring.
Through it all, I came to think back then that the only home I wanted was that trailer, the single-wide Unc seemed to fill one end to the other with his just being Unc, and the spotless way he kept the place, the shag carpet always fresh vacuumed, and the orange and brown plaid foldout sofa—my bed—it was my job to have made and put away by 6:30 A.M. no matter what day of the week it was. Back then home had also been Miss Dinah Galliard and Tabitha’s place, the house the two of them lived in only a couple miles away from Unc, a half-trailer, half-shanty concoction painted haint purple, the inside stacked with more books per square inch of living space than I’ve ever seen, Miss Dinah homeschooling Tabitha from day one.
Home had been Hungry Neck itself and that land I thought I’d worked out my self-inflicted therapy on, and home’d been the long low white dining cabin we called the clubhouse out there, with its screened windows and picnic tables jammed with those lawyers and doctors on Saturday morning hunts, at one end of the room an old iron stove where Miss Dinah and Tabitha cooked up the best grits and bacon and eggs and biscuits and fried chicken in the world.
But if I were a smarter person back then I would’ve seen my home, just as much as all of Hungry Neck, had been that house on Marie, and my mom inside it, trying to make a life for the two of us in North Charleston, and I would have understood that even those railroad tracks at the end of the street, that place where we kids gathered and did nothing but look at the steam off the stack of the paper mill, was home.
The same stack you could see from the fifteenth hole here at Landgrave Hall.
Tabitha gave up on me our senior year of high school. Of course I’d like to blame it on the whole thing about her being black and me being white, that stupid star-cross’d Montagues and Capulets business. Or I’d like to blame it on what seemed the remnants of the whole master-slave thing: Unc the landowner, her mom the cook.
Sometimes I’d even like to blame it on what might’ve seemed to anyone else the biggest dog on the porch between us: the fact Tabitha was deaf and dumb, though political correctness would have me call her simply hard of hearing, because—believe me—she can use those vocal cords when she wants to. But the whole hearing thing was never a problem between us. Ever.
She was smart. And beautiful.
Turns out it was me with the handicap. Me the one who was impaired, my pride—the same sort that made Unc golf at night—like some congenital defect lodged deep in me that kept me from seeing clearly, and from walking
upright, and from listening to sense. It was my brain that was the biggest problem between us, and whether or not I’d ever see my way to using the one I’d been given to figure out I needed to deal the right way with the what-all shit I’d seen. Those bodies. And the man I’d killed, the one I’d made into nothing more than yet another of those bodies.
I thought I got over it.
She went on up to Duke, me to my glorious tenure in Chapel Hill. Though she’d been homeschooled, Tabitha’d accrued so many AP credits she was up near being a junior when she walked in the door. Her first semester she was in upper-division courses with names like Topics in Data Compression, Computational Linguistics, Numeric Artificial Intelligence.
Me? I was busy racking up D’s in English, Spanish, Karate, and Intro to Computer Programming, laying the solid foundation of getting my ass kicked out.
By then, too, she’d met up there the son of the owner of that monstrosity of an orange house in Mount Pleasant, where Unc plays poker every Thursday night. Thomas Warchester Whaley the Fifth. Five, for short. They ended up lab partners in—what else?—some computer course, and last I saw on Facebook was that they were both “in a relationship.” Hence the bit of history I have with ol’ Five. Why I sit in the Range Rover figuring routes to Palo Alto on my Maps app instead of hanging around inside his dad’s ugly manse on Thursday nights while Unc loses or wins at Texas hold ’em.
And then, my second year to college, the next shit started, the tricky shit it seems I’ll never get scraped off the bottom of my shoe for the way it’s led me to here, and enjoying the life of luxury, replete now with yet another dead body:
Unc sold off a 130-acre chunk of Hungry Neck to developers, the parcel a wide swath of land that butted up against that precious island where all that booty had been discovered, and the access corridor through the woods to get out there. All because Charleston County was gearing up to lay claim to it by eminent domain due to the “historical magnitude” of who and what had been buried out there three hundred years before: the Mothers and Fathers, the first slaves to land in Charleston.
Talk was big about turning the tract into some kind of Williamsburg, Virginia, but different. This place wouldn’t celebrate the whites who’d owned the land but the blacks who’d worked it—those original slaves who dug the dikes and culverts and races for the rice plantations by hand, landmarks you can still see easy as day just driving down 17 and across any of the causeways you will. Next came the condos and a small “towne centre” outdoor mall—what the developers’d really wanted to put in there all along. Condos and shops, they figured, was the only way to get anyone that far into the woods to visit a burial site. The world, they decided, needed one more retail and residential zone.
Then, finally, the real estate bubble popped like a bathtub fart.
Three-fourths of everything had been built when it all went bust four years back, scattered now through that tract of woods like bones picked clean four dozen three-story condos and that mall. Tar paper on roofs stripping off piece by piece every time a storm comes through. Faded green Tyvek peeling away like dead skin. The whole thing shut down. Nothing but a chain-link fence surrounding the Mothers and Fathers.
And Unc, and Mom, and me all left holding bags of money. Because Unc had gotten ours when the getting was good, sold that tract two years before Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the whole banking world marched straight into hell.
Suddenly we’d gotten rich, and since then the closest I came to anybody from those days up on the tracks was Jessup Horry, who I see—other than nights like these when he escorts us off the course and into the jon boat—when he happens to be on shift and I’m pulling up to the gatehouse on my way in from wherever I’ve toted Unc. He leans out the little white-brick building, gives a wave and smile, opens the iron gates for us. If the weather is nice I’ll have the window down and say hey. But if we have the air-conditioning on, pretty much nine months out of the year, or the month or so when we have on the heater, I never even bother to roll down the window, only nod, smile, and drive on through.
That’s the kind of friend I ended up being to Jessup, even though I miss so much those olden days of high school: I couldn’t be bothered enough to lose a moment of either cool air or warm for him.
I made it to the avenue of oaks, crossed the gravel street—they were all gravel out here, nothing paved—and started down the right-hand side, parallel to the eleventh fairway. From here the live oaks stood in two columns ten yards apart and stretched a half mile ahead, all the way to where the plantation house had once stood. In this dark the trees made a black and heavy canopy over the road, hanging everywhere in it hanks of Spanish moss like the gray beards of men long dead.
Landgrave Hall is one of the original Lowcountry plantations, a thumb-shaped piece of land that juts north out into marsh, Goose Creek snaking along its outline, the parcel a mile wide and a mile and a half long. It’d already been around for twenty years when the Yemassee War started in 1715, Landgrave Elliot’s son, Thomas, putting together a militia in the front yard of the house, then riding right along this avenue on his way out to fight the Cherokee and Yemassee busy massacring every settler they could. Both Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, and his mortal enemy Banastre Tarleton had stalked each other through here during the Revolution, and George Washington rode this gravel track in 1791, when he’d made his southern tour, had lunch with Thomas’s grandson Charles Prioleau Elliot, then spent a couple hours touring the grounds. P.G.T. Beauregard, not but a week before he gave the go-ahead to fire on Fort Sumter, attended a ball in the house that had been at the end of this road, and four years later the same P.G.T. Beauregard, once he’d given the order to evacuate Charleston before the Union troops arrived, sat in its parlor and cried like a little girl at losing the city.
It was fire that finally took the old house down in 1892, an ironic fluke that usually made me smile for how it happened: former slave George Murray, a customs inspector down in Charleston, was running to represent the district in the U.S. Congress, and there’d been a rally against the whole idea of a black man doing so, right here at Landgrave Hall, all under the direction of Henry Manigault Elliot, then the descendant in residence. It’d been a get-together that featured a cross twenty feet high burning away in the ellipse garden behind the house, there on the bluff that overlooked Goose Creek, meant to send a signal to every black in the district what a vote for Murray might mean.
And a rebel ember caught a whiff of wind, wandered inside an open window of the place to land at the foot of the curtains of an upstairs bedroom. In a glorious conflagration that lasted all of an hour, the plantation house was swallowed whole, nothing left of it but two charred chimneys, a brick foundation, and a rubble of slate shingles.
George Murray won the election. Henry Manigault Elliot, penniless for thirty years afterward, sold the empty tract in 1922 to an assemblage of blue bloods with the revolutionary idea of a gated private community with a golf course.
But thinking on that didn’t make me smile at all tonight, and I only walked along the avenue, looked up in those trees. I was breathing easier now, though there was still a body not far from here, yet more history being poured out on these grounds that’d known so much of it. And there’d be even more history to come soon enough, though of a more private sort: I’d have to hide the goggles and face the wrath of Mom. I’d have to tell her why I was coming in the front door and not in from the dock off the back, and why I was alone and not with Unc.
I hunched my shoulders in close, looked down from those dead men’s beards to the road, cut between two live oaks on my right, crossed in front of the tee box of the eleventh.
Coming out from beneath that canopy, I could see the sky again, the all of it caught in a kind of bowl, the rim of it the black trees that bordered this fairway. There were places like this out to Hungry Neck, clearings in the woods where the ground lay too low for pine to grow up, and sometimes back when I was working out what I thought I’d worked out I’d t
ake nighttime walks deep into the forest, and I’d come on these sorts of places, and look up at that sky above me, endless and filled with stars.
But out here the sky was made up of only those thin stars I’d been able to see out on the water, that wash of them behind and above Unc. Sure, there’d been a half-moon out earlier, gone beneath the tree line now, but around here even on a moonless night I was lucky to find Orion for the pale film of light that filled the sky.
There were the lights off the paper mill to blame, of course, and the freeway lamps that ran all along the Mark Clark, and the lights at the port terminal sitting on the Cooper River, where all those container trucks on the freeway were always headed, and heaped onto that just the general blast of light the whole of Charleston gave off.
But the worst of it was from the stadium-like lights a hundred feet above the Navy brig, not a half mile south of this piece of land. Where supposedly they keep those terrorists Unc was hollering about us being treated like when Harmon and Stanhope pointed their guns at us.
At the bottom edge of the thumb Landgrave Hall sits on, there runs an eight-foot chain-link fence, three strands of barbed wire above it. Just the other side of it starts yet more Navy property, our gated golf community of cottages sandwiched between the Weapons Station land across Goose Creek to the north and that Navy land to the south. In winter, when you’re on the green at sixteen or the tee at seventeen, you can see through the trees that fence, just beyond it Perimeter Road, the paved single-lane that encircles their whole property.
The only way I can figure these posh old houses and this golf course are even here and not a part of Navy land is because the money got here first. The Naval Shipyard, a couple miles south of here on the Cooper River in North Charleston, started up under Teddy Roosevelt, and as the Yard grew north and south along the river, bits of property were bought up and built on. Until they hit here. That’s when the blue bloods must have drawn their line in the sand, and the Navy obeyed, leapfrogging Landgrave Hall to just north of Goose Creek, where the Naval Weapons Station is, the land sprawling out big and wide so the government could take up all it wanted. That’s where they store the bombs, everyone knows, in the ammo dumps you can see on Google Earth. That’s where, too, the nuke school is, the training center for every sailor ends up inside a submarine, and where when I was a kid the nuclear submarine base was. That place where Trident missiles got loaded onto subs and sent out to sea.
