by Bret Lott
But to the south of us there’s other buildings than the brig—there’s SPAWAR, the Navy’s charming acronym for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, the building filled with brainiac engineers working on secret stuff nobody talks about; and there’s an Army transportation battalion headquartered out there, the whole complex butted up against the Cooper River itself so that ships can be loaded with sand-colored MRAPs, those giant Hummers-on-steroids they built specifically to make it alive through the improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with tanks and transport vehicles—and of course the requisite ammo for all—you can see being hauled in on trucks out on Remount Road and riding in on the trains.
There’s a heliport over there, above the trees now and again one of those big Chinook helicopters with their two sets of rotors lifting up or coming down, toting whatever it is they tote in those things. There’s even a half dozen or so jet fuel storage tanks over there, just inside the fence beside North Rhett, six or seven huge tanks you could hit with a slingshot from the sidewalk if you wanted.
But the United States Naval Consolidated Brig is Hanahan’s claim to fame. It’s the only place in the U. S. of A. where terrorists are kept—Jose Padilla was holed up out there for four years before the government moved him on, and Kahlah al-Marri was there for six.
And it’s also one of the main places always being mentioned when any talk of closing down Gitmo is afoot, though it was built back in 1989 for nothing more than medium-security risks, sailors and marines gone middle-ground thug while in the service of our country.
There’s always rumors going on about terrorists nobody knows about being kept inside, and when those two Egyptian kids got hauled in a few years back, engineering students from the University of South Florida who got caught driving near the Naval Weapons Station with what they called fireworks in their trunk, talk was those two would end up at the brig for the duration, keeping whoever else was camping out in there company. Though one of them was acquitted, the other convicted for making a video that taught you how to make a radio control toy into a detonator, neither ever did any time in there. Still, who knows what really goes on inside other than the guards standing watch.
Maybe there’s terrorists over there. Maybe not. But it just isn’t a part of what the blue bloods here think on or worry over: it’s the golf game they have coming up tomorrow or the next day, and the stock portfolio falling and rising and falling again, and their table at the clubhouse and who’ll get the one looks out onto the pond once its present owner keels over.
Terrorists? That’s somebody else’s problem.
All the United States Naval Consolidated Brig means here to Landgrave Hall is that light seepage over the land, and yet one more layer of history, one I’m certain nobody, from Landgrave to Henry Manigault, could have ever foreseen: a prison less than a mile from where the old plantation house once stood.
I jogged across the fairway, beneath that bowl of milky dark. Somebody up at this hour in any one of the three cottages along the right side of this hole could see me plain as day right now, and so I sort of ducked low, made for where the cart path cut through even denser trees for the tenth green.
Jessup’d come through here in his golf cart only a while ago, but in the opposite direction, headed for me and Unc, and I wondered what he’d thought he was getting into on his way to roust us out yet again. On the one hand he must have been ticked at us for breaking the club rules, for making him have to haul out there and write up whatever report he’d have to turn in—there was always a report drawn up, Unc the one to sign off without a word on the breach when the smiling club manager, Cliff Somebody, showed up at the house the next day in his straw Greg Norman hat and teal blue LHGC logo shirt, the clipboard in hand, report typed and ready. But on the other hand maybe Jessup’d thought this was a welcome break, his having to climb on a cart, say so long to Segundo at the front gate, then cruising through the dark to handle the dimbulb antics of the Rich and Stupid.
Jessup was one of the good guys I’d known in school, and not just because he was a part of the non-crowd hanging out and drinking Colt 45s on the tracks. He was the kind of kid who was smarter than he’d ever let on, seemed to ace all his tests without ever studying, but kept quiet the fact he got those A’s. So it’d always seemed to me he’d be going on to college, too.
But then, when we were juniors, 9/11 happened. He dropped out of school the next day, took his GED, and joined the Army, all before the smoke’d literally cleared at Ground Zero, then served two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. He was a Ranger, and’d made it to staff sergeant and gotten a Purple Heart and been awarded a Bronze Star before he’d gotten out. His story, these thin bits of it, had come to me through the fog of my own wallowing out to Hungry Neck back then, and later through the even thicker fog of a failed college career: now and again I’d hear words at me from Mom about how she’d seen somebody at the Winn-Dixie over on Rivers who’d heard about his medals, or how one of the nurses she worked with down at MUSC had heard he’d re-upped.
Charleston, finally, was about as small a world as you could get.
Now I wished he was with me, or me with him, riding in his cart back to the house. I wished I didn’t have the goggles on me for whatever garbage it meant for us to have them, and wished we were buzzing along here on the dogleg left the tenth hole was, because somebody had to have seen I was gone by now. Most likely Harmon with that M4, but if my luck held out—and it seemed it had thus far—all the cops and DNRs and recovery scuba dudes digging up the body would keep him distracted enough.
And if he wasn’t the one to spot me gone, more than likely it would be Miss Quillie Izerd Grimball, her cracker radar always on. Every second after I’d taken off was a second closer to her seeing one less blip on the screen and calling out like it was a bingo win that a redneck had fled the scene.
When the blue bloods bought the land, in 1922, the eleven families that anted up the dough made a pact among themselves that no one other than the families involved could ever live here. If somebody wanted to sell a house—there were only nineteen to start with, though it’s grown to thirty-three since then—they had to offer it first to a member of the family selling it; if that member wasn’t interested, the place could only be sold to a member of one of those other ten families. And if nobody in any of the families was interested in buying said cottage, then and only then could the place be sold to someone from Off, but only if all eleven families agreed. For one reason and another, there are eighteen families spread through those thirty-three homes now, all of them, for one reason and another, still with just the right blood.
We weren’t supposed to be the kind of people to live out here, because these were the rules of Landgrave Hall.
But damned if it didn’t turn out we had the right blood, too. And damned if we weren’t a family willing to live by those rules.
Ol’ Dupont—Judge Beauchamp Redfield Dupont—was the one got us in here. Judge Dupont, the man whose cottage we always put in at, the one whose creek held fast a woman’s body right this second, and through whose French doors I’d met the eyes of his Guatemalan nurse. He’d been the one ushered us into the whole ordered universe that was Landgrave Hall, him the one responsible for opening the gilded door and hauling us all in.
He and Unc’d known each other through the court system for years, since Unc’d first graduated from the police academy up in Columbia and’d returned to the Lowcountry to be a snot-nosed cadet, Judge Dupont back then a criminal court judge. Unc had testified at enough trials in front of the judge to let him know Unc was a good and reliable man, a man who meant to be a good cop and meant to be one for life. Unc tells stories now and again of how back in the early days, back before he’d been blinded, he’d taken the judge out to Hungry Neck for turkey or deer, or out to the trestle to fish for spottail bass, and tell too of how the judge, already an older man by then, always scolded him for the conflict of interest this might seem, a judge and a cop out hunting tog
ether. “But he was a good judge,” Unc always finished those stories, “fair and just and tough.”
Through the years the judge’d been promoted and promoted, until he’d ended up a bigwig U.S. district judge, only to retire a couple years ago for Alzheimer’s kicking in hard. But he’d always kept an eye on Unc through his career, and’d thought Unc good at what he’d done, too.
But four years ago, once all the dust’d settled over the sale of the land out to Hungry Neck, once a pile of money bigger than any one of us—Mom, Unc, or me—could have imagined that piece of dirt out there could have been worth, Unc’d gotten a call from Judge Dupont, who clued him in on a little bit of news he hoped Unc would appreciate.
It just so happened that some neighbors of the judge’s out here to Landgrave Hall were going through a divorce right then, a nasty one in which a Prioleau (he) was pitted against a Grimball (she), a husband and wife from two of the founding families. A couple who’d united twenty-seven years before in wedded bliss, only to end up childless and in a nuptial smackdown so fierce that Prioleau wanted to sell the house out from under his wife before she could have a say in it—it was, according to the rules, his cottage to sell, come down to him through his own Prioleau side—and thereby head off any miring up of the monies were the place to be tied up in court.
The judge’d done the research—he was himself a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and’d had access to the right genealogists—and, having seen of Unc’s good fortune played out in The Post and Courier over the months it took to secure the burial site and then for Unc to decide to sell it, and knowing Unc for the man he was, informed him that he was a Prioleau on his grandmother’s side, and would he care to put in a request to buy what was his rightful fiefdom?
Unc’d proposed the idea while we three were on our way home from the closing of the sale of the property out to Hungry Neck at the lawyer’s office on Broad Street downtown, headed up Meeting Street and away from those huge Charleston mansions behind us, with their gardens and carriage houses and piazzas with joggling boards. Though there was now stashed in Unc’s bank account a wad of cash with what seemed enough zeros to keep afloat a third world country, there lay before us only the sad fact of the house on Marie, with its oil spots on the driveway, front yard rubbed to bare dirt in places.
I was driving Mom’s Corolla—Unc’s Range Rover, my Tundra, and Mom’s BMW 750Li were still a month or so away—beside me Mom, Unc in the back, and I pulled to a stop at the light at Columbus Street. Though Broad Street was only a couple miles behind us, this might as well have been a different planet, so quick was the decline in neighborhoods the farther north of Broad you got. Outside my window stood the Piggly Wiggly up here, scene of enough robberies and shots fired to give it its own reality show.
That was when Unc said, “Got a call from Judge Dupont,” and I glanced in the rearview. “Turns out some element of our blood runs blue. Prioleau, somehow. He wants to know if we want to buy a place out to Landgrave Hall.”
By this time it’d been already decided that Unc would live with Mom and me, once we’d closed on the land. It wouldn’t be a single-wide he’d relocate to, we knew, but a big place, a place he’d need help navigating, and so it’d simply been seen as a done deal Unc would live with us, and that we’d have a place big enough to let him feel like he was living alone. Not to mention the ease and convenience of having me there to take him where he needed when I was home from school.
“You game?” Unc said to Mom. “You think we could pull off living out to Landgrave Hall?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
She hadn’t moved a muscle, only sat beside me, her black leather purse in her lap, both hands holding tight to it. She’d dressed up for the closing, had on a black suit with a purple silk blouse. She was smiling, her eyes straight ahead, so that I’d only been able to see this side of her face. She was still pretty, still petite, though the wrinkles beside her eyes were getting on past the point where you could call them laugh lines. But her eyes were still that same sharp green, her red hair still in its soft curls, that same spray of freckles across the top of her nose what somebody’d think was cute.
“Let’s go look at it,” she said. “Right now.”
“Sort of hoping you’d say that,” Unc said, and I could hear him move a little, then the quiet tap of him punching in numbers on his cellphone.
Of course we’d talked by then of different possibilities for the place we’d all end up living—everywhere from Kiawah to Pawleys Island to South of Broad itself.
But here Landgrave Hall had been served up, that mysterious land of secret wealth and importance. Kiawah and Pawleys were only cheap knockoffs of this place, the original enclave of the haves. Even South of Broad paled, made the neighborhood seem like a parade of dioramas for some giant science project, with its plague of tourists always wandering the streets and peering in windows of those homes.
Still Mom was smiling. But it was a different smile, I could tell, one I couldn’t remember having seen on her face before. “Landgrave Hall,” she whispered. She nodded once, said, “Yes.”
In this manner, the issue was settled.
I could see out her window the bus stop at this intersection, always a busy one being so close to the Piggly Wiggly. A couple dozen people out there at the curb, all waiting. Blacks mostly, but some Mexicans in there, and a few whites.
But there, right in front of them all, stood a white family: the father, a guy no older than me with a cowboy hat on, no shirt, and a pair of jeans; beside him the mom, in a rainbow-colored tube top and short shorts, long straight hair parted in the middle and down past her shoulders.
And in front of them, right at the edge of the curb and happy for it, him smiling and smiling, stood a toddler, three years old at the most, wearing nothing but a diaper and a pair of kid cowboy boots. He was looking back the way we’d come, watching like everyone else for the bus to come, and now he put his hands up, and clapped.
“We’re on, Judge,” Unc said behind me, and I looked in the rearview again, saw Unc with his cellphone to his ear. He nodded, said, “Tell Cousin Prioleau we’ll be there in twenty minutes, driving a tan Corolla,” and slapped it shut.
Still Mom smiled, her looking straight ahead.
A bus rolled up just then, filled her window, that family and everyone else gone.
Twenty minutes later we were turning right off of North Rhett up in Hanahan and onto a two-lane I’d never ventured on before, because I and everyone else who knew what lay at the end of this simple piece of pavement knew it led to a place some of us were allowed, and most of us weren’t.
Trees edged in thick on either side of the road, and I saw up ahead a white-brick gatehouse, a closed wrought-iron gate. And a person I thought I might recognize, someone maybe I knew, leaning out the gatehouse as we neared.
Jessup Horry.
The gate swung open.
Five weeks later, me home for spring break, I helped Mom pack up what little we’d be taking with us to the new house: a few things out of the fridge and pantry, my old kid stuff—books, models, a bit of old clothes—and nothing else. Everything in the house had been sold with it, from the silverware in the drawers to the garden hose out back.
I’d watched as she’d tossed into garbage bags every bit of her clothes, from the least pair of those little footie-stocking things you wear with a pair of shoes to her series of ten sequined cocktail dresses, every one way too short for any mom to wear. Though they had cost half a paycheck each—she’d been a pediatric nurse at the Medical University for the last ten years by then—she’d worn each dress only once, to the annual Med U Christmas party. Ten dresses, stuffed into trash bags along with every other piece of clothing she owned, me the one to haul it all out to the curb.
Except for the nurse’s outfits themselves. These she’d set in a separate pile on her bed, and once all her clothes were gone, she’d gathered them all up, those sadly colorful scrub outfits with their balloons or flowers or
rainbow pinstripes, and went out to the kitchen, then through the back door to the yard, where she tossed them in a pile, doused them with lighter fluid from a rusty can next to the hibachi on the stoop—we left the hibachi too—and lit them up.
We’d stood there in the backyard watching them all go, set atop the pile her two pairs of white nurse’s shoes, my mom hugging herself and smiling at the show of this all, and I looked at her.
Here were those freckles, that smile.
For a moment I’d felt good right along with her, just us two saying goodbye to the job she’d held all those years to make our lives here close to bearable, saying goodbye too to this life lived out next to the Mark Clark, a neighborhood where at any given moment you could hear from the freeway the shriek of Jake brakes on eighteen-wheelers, and where sometimes at night the smell of the paper mill a mile away was so bad you’d think a cat had crapped in your pillowcase.
The rest of my semester, with its failing grades in Biology and that History of the South course, the D’s I would get in my Spanish III and English classes, was still somewhere past the horizon but looming all the same. But suddenly I felt good. After all those years of our living in this run-down neighborhood, with its cars up on blocks in the driveways, front yards rubbed to bare dirt, and random shootings at the Aquarius Social Club three blocks away or armed robberies at the Hot Spot gas station and mini-mart over on Murray, I saw we were going to escape. We were going to make it out of this place alive, and my mom was happy.
