The nurse delivered Mom to us in a wheelchair, a sight more unnerving than that of her in the hospital bed. The day she was released from the hospital, my brothers stayed at Nana’s house. The boys were too much to handle. She slept deeply and with the television playing in the background. I walked over and turned the set off, watching to see if the sudden absence of dialogue or the high pitch of static would wake her. Her physical fragility came through to me as I watched her sleep. I thought of her at home before Jared was born: skin pink and radiant and the heaviness of her pregnancy fixing her to the ground. It was a different kind of broken than the sadness I tried to prevent by following her around, no less permanent but still somehow more terrifying, after seeing her so close to vanishing permanently to a place where I would never find her. I watched her chest rise and fall and half expected her to float away.
I tiptoed out of her room and crossed the den to my bedroom, not knowing what to do with such a thought. I knew Dad would return from his cigarette run any second, but I climbed under the blankets on my bed, covering my whole self with their weight and lying in the comfort of darkness. As the knocking began and grew louder, I only wanted to hide. The doorbell started to sound, one ring on top of another, and I could tell he was angry. And suddenly, it stopped. I held my breath, hoping maybe he had gone away or that I might fall into sleep myself. That I would never be asked to do anything so big as be responsible for my mother again.
But then my door flew open. The sheets were ripped off the bed, clumsily they caught on his arms. What did I tell yous, mixed in the rustle of bedding. I felt Dad’s hand, the one callused from guitar strings, on my head. For a second, it was the same motion as his patting the top of our collie’s head, but then his fingers laced through my hair and pulled. In this way, he pulled me off the bed and onto the floor. Never losing his grip, a good one right at the scalp, he dragged me through the door frame and into the den. My heels and my thighs burned from the friction as I moved across the rug. Twisting around, I saw my mother half naked and leaning against a wall, too weak to come any farther. She had answered the door in my place and now watched him struggle with himself.
He had tried so hard all his life to be better than the father who beat him senseless. He was the one who followed his mother around, willing protection on her through the power of his presence alone, and when that didn’t work, he grew up and fought back. I didn’t want to fight back. Consumed with grief and tired to the soul, Dad couldn’t help but fall into the ease of the oldest pattern he knew. Was this was what it meant to be a Jones? He seemed to find himself just in time, and he let me go with soothing sorrys and songs all afternoon. Though I’m sure I was mad, even then I realized that I knew him better for it. We were now more alike than he’d wanted us to be, and as he had done, too, I found solace as well as adventure and opportunity in putting words on paper. He had stopped singing like he used to after the wreck, but once Jared came home, after two months in the neonatal hospital, softly at first and then almost like his old self, Dad sang to his third son to the beeping metronome of the rented heart monitor and whirr of the oxygen tank. Just like Nana sang to us and to himself, “You Are My Sunshine.”
There is an alley in Charleston between Church and State Streets called officially Philadelphia Alley but known to most as Dueler’s Alley, where duels were held under the law until the 1880s. The walls are high and of red brick. Trees grow leggy to reach the sun and planters filled with tropical ferns and neon azalea line its narrowness. It connected to a graveyard, though that is no feat in a city as old as Charleston. Here went the honorable drunken men, gentle or not, to resolve their rows with pistols at dawn. Here we find the ghost of a young doctor among all the rest. A man from Rhode Island, Dr. Ladd, found room and board at the yellow house with the green shutters on Church Street, and so happy was Dr. Ladd here that Charlestonians knew him by his whistling. A friend became jealous of his popularity, and after a prolonged falling-out over things lost to time, challenged Dr. Ladd to a duel. He was shot in Dueler’s Alley, where translucent men and gunshots are oft heard, but died in the house on Church Street. For centuries since, Charlestonians have caught the ghost of Dr. Ladd whistling up and down Church Street, and in the darkness of Dueler’s Alley. The constant humming of Dad over Jared’s crib remind me of Dr. Ladd’s soft whistles, content-sounding but also eerie, not quite right. He wasn’t reachable is what it was.
Before Jared was a year old, my parents had to sell the little brown house in Conway to pay down the medical bills. There was no room for us at Nana’s house, already home to Uncle Mike and his sons. Grandpa let us move into a beach cottage he owned in Cherry Grove, on the north end of the Low Country. On our first night in Cherry Grove, Justin, Jason, and I followed an illuminated lane of mid-summer moonlight to the wooden steps leading down to the beach. It’s a strange patch of elevated Low Country, right next to the pier, in a region known for the appearance of straightforward flatness. Usually, even the outstretched arms of high tide stayed yards beyond the stairs, a sunbather’s sandy dream. That night, some unseen storm of low pressure beyond the horizon was met by the full moon’s arms so that the water and its waves swelled to storm-surge heights. We were drawn to the cusp of that veiled realm, as children in books are unable to resist forbidden forests and beckoning songs their parents cannot detect. It was a calm, clear night otherwise, but we knew our beaches intimately as beach kids do and could tell the greedy undulation of our normally placid water was not for swimming. We sat on the very top step practically still on North Ocean Boulevard, that’s how high the ocean reached, and we held tight to the wooden railing as warm water lifted our little brown bodies with the ease of wind tugging a feather. We giggled and screamed as the summer sea licked at our arms and faces and sucked at our toes, pulling at our whole selves as magnets pulled. We were giddy with feeling the power of what lay unseen and unsaid on our skin. Such a force was nearly singing with joy in a language I could not quite make out, and I imagined all the maidens and sailors ever lost at sea had thrown an underwater ball. This was not an angry sea, but one stretching for the pleasure of its own power like a cat upon waking. This was not the night for blood sacrifices, and as children are creatures connected by imagination to the unknown, we were blessed with a show just for us.
Soaking wet, we laughed our way across the boulevard, to the screened-in porch where Dad smoked and sang. I recall jangly songs of vacation and escape in place of the country choruses. He’d put his own music down for the longest period I’d seen him in the three years between the wreck and Jared’s birth, questioning whether it was even worth it to try any longer. The guitar remained in its case in a closet. Together on the porch, he taught us the words to Beach Boys songs about other beachy islands. We never harmonized as well as he tried to teach us, but we defied gravity in our own way that first night. This is the point in the story before our characters make a decision, for good or for bad, the dreamy hit of nicotine inhaled and held inside before breathing out things you can’t take back once released. It was this summer in Cherry Grove that I disappeared a little more fully into the sanctuary of imagination that springs from the space between pages, where I visited stories for their safety, their reliability, as I saw Nana escape into the sanctuary of her books.
I was taught in history class about Theodosia Burr, the placidly beautiful daughter of Aaron Burr who was lost at sea during a storm off Cape Hatteras. That, at least, is the commonsense theory, though she and her ship may well have been captured by pirates, and the passengers forced to walk the plank. Some say she’s been walking the shore a few counties up, looking for her treasure, which was also given to the ocean. Brookgreen Gardens tries to claim her ghost, saying she walks among the statues near her husband’s grave, but I don’t buy it. Perhaps I shied away from Theodosia because embedded in stories about her tragic death was the subtle spin that she brought it on herself, the same as Alice did. Are the legends of her mysterious fate imposed on her as some sort of punish
ment? She was one of the few educated women of her time. Her father, before gunning down Alexander Hamilton, figured Theodosia worthy of schooling, and she was the first educated woman I had heard of. A New Yorker, no less, who was still deemed worthy of a Southern ghost story. In a townhouse in Greenwich Village, she read her Greek and hosted parties and married a man, the future governor of South Carolina, who valued her knowledge at least as much as any other offerings of marriage. Was it the ocean taking revenge on an unnaturally educated woman when it pulled her and her ship down? More likely the kneading of history by men. This is what happened to women who didn’t know their place. Who had a fancy New York education and thought themselves as valuable as their husbands, and who let them know it, to boot. They walked the plank and were eaten alive by sharks in the cold dark sea. If pirates managed to overtake her ship, I like to think of either Anne Bonney or Mary Read stepping on board to loot and pillage, recognizing Theodosia as another mouthy, ambitious woman and hitting it off. I could feel the crystals of salt clinging to my tangled and windswept hair, the metal of a dagger cool as rain strapped to my ankle, and the weight of a blade on my hip. How close the sour tang of marsh air. The fire-crackle snaps of thousands of pistol shrimp in the mud as the flames of sunrise seep from horizon into land. Maybe we could all take tea together before sailing off to an imagined land where their dispositions were not punishable, by noose or plank.
Sometimes Dad took me to the Cherry Grove pier to fish or to the beach for rounds of catch with baseballs sometimes landing in the waves. For hours, we’d throw back and forth until his instructions fell into silence. It was an uneasy time for all of us, and I remember very little of Mom then. Perhaps she was busy taking care of Jared, who turned a year old that summer. As I was nine when he was born, I feel half his sibling and half his guardian. I remember feeding him and the foul smell of formula, rocking him to sleep, holding up his fat wrists as he took first steps. I was the oldest and only girl. The boys were not going to be asked to babysit, I knew by then. They were as free to roam and loiter as they always were, bringing home sunburned shoulders and hermit crabs collected on the beach or bought at a strip mall. Jared rode my own kid-narrow hips as much as Mom’s. Through the bond of attention or the gamble of genes, he has grown up the most like me, and the good folks of South Carolina, well-meaning, have asked if we are not identical twins.
He was a good baby, his teeth the only sign of the months he spent in the hospital instead of our home. They came in rotted away through the middle in tiny arches and sharp as razor blades on their ends. The older boys and I thought it was funny to teach him to bite the others, until our own blood was drawn. I remember him crying only once. Mom had been crying about something I could feel and nothing she’d say, after driving around with me and Jared, driving home from Nana’s perhaps. She pulled into the parking lot of Belk, the local department store, and said she’d be back in a minute. Of course, I whined for her not to go, it was dark and late and, in my memory, pouring rain. After a few minutes turned into ten and then twenty and more, Jared shrieked inconsolably. His screams, so loud from such a tiny thing, burned in the darkness, squalls pounded our minivan, and suddenly I was begging God and Jesus above to please help. I did not know what to do. Wrapped inside the veil of wan streetlight, I thought of the night she hit a deer with our old station wagon. A memory forgotten on purpose or hiding with the other creatures that came out only at night. We had been driving back from a visit to Grandpa’s house. The boys slept, and I lay awake watching the stars skip over tree branches. The webworms waved and beckoned. Car headlights floated into our den and then flickered gone. Mom hummed or sang softly with the radio. The sounds of the drive rose and fell alongside the chests of my sleeping brothers, between the slow blinks. I was never a good sleeper. Still I hesitate to close eyes in need of rest, reluctant to miss what entity might lurk between imagination and presence. The lurching thud and invisible hands pulling me backward even as I shot forward, like on a roller coaster, and suddenly we are at a gas station. Mom is sobbing under the same sickly gray yellow as the parking-lot lights at the mall, and a gas station attendant, an old skinny man in a dirty uniform, is examining the front of the car where she hit a deer.
Finally, Mom came back out with a small plastic bag. Anger and relief welled up in tangles, and I could say nothing. Jared quieted with her return, a mother’s presence one of the few things I couldn’t give him. Now I see clearly a need for the luxury of five minutes to herself, away from a depressed husband on the edge of addiction, and four kids, one needier than the next. Just to be alone, to breathe without small hands grasping at her legs or breasts. To contemplate something new for herself from all the unused things around her, and then the need to have something to look forward to, an object through which to imagine herself anew. In silence, tears surged and splashed. They fell from her, and they fell from me. Every salty drop connected me to her and her to me like the shining links of filigree that Nana had given to her, that she would one day give to me. Perhaps Jared could sense not just the storm outside, but a temptation flaring, even for just a second, hot and dry in the clammy rain. She could leave us all as her own mother had done and be free of all this, but she just started up the car.
Nana had once attempted to claim her freedom and had tried to get out of Myrtle Beach. She rocked in her recliner and looked at me on the couch when she told me about packing a bag and taking off. Granddaddy’s waitress F had been coming around more and more, and all the boys were grown and out of school. She got in the car and was driving up to Columbia to stay with her friend Joree. When she got to Florence, an hour outside of Myrtle Beach, she saw flashing lights in the rearview window. “Can I help you, Officer? I don’t know what I was doin’ wrong.” She had only been a pretty blonde he’d wanted to talk to until he saw the last name on her driver’s license. The Joneses had the lawmen in their pockets, they bragged.
“What are you doin’ so far from home, Mrs. Jones?”
“Sir, I’m leaving my husband.”
“No, you’re not. You’re going back home.”
Back in the present, her voice unwavering and matter-of-fact, “He followed me all the way back to the driveway too.”
She wanted me to know that she had tried to leave. That she had wanted to. That not everybody gets to move freely in the world. That is what she wanted for me.
9
_________
Whiskey Jones
GRANDDADDY HAD BEEN TELLING DAD TO GIVE up on music for years.
“I just don’t see how on earth you gonna make a living is all,” he said in his office at the Sandcastle. It was a gentle tack for him. “You gotta be thinking about them kids, Mark. You don’t have time for none of this guitar nonsense.”
He meant as well as he ever had. Better, I suppose, as even he could see that Dad was in a bad spot. His leg was holding up better than the rest of him. Granddaddy had a philosophy of not helping anybody but himself, and even in my dad’s broken state, he would never give him a job or lend him a dime. Perhaps unused to compassionate tones from Granddaddy or too tired to imagine anything anymore, Dad decided to open his own restaurant. He’d managed his uncle Herman’s Pancake House in Garden City for years. Another Jones getting into the restaurant business, feeding tourists. It was the way of things.
Love needs something to look forward to, and my parents needed something new that did not come with an outstanding balance in a number-ten envelope. They did not need to look too far. Like anybody who really knows how to make a buck, like Granddaddy and Uncle Jack, their brother Herman seemed willing to overlook irregularities of the financial kind if it meant he could take advantage of collecting later. According to family stories, anyway. Like his brothers, he hit his bottom line and seemed to care little about at whose expense, and he rented to my parents an empty two-story building in an orange stucco finish with white columns out front at the end of a strip mall on King’s Highway, a few blocks down from Captain Hook’s Pirate Advent
ure Mini-Golf in one direction and Nana’s house in the other. The front door opened onto black-and-white checkered tile that led back to the wide oak bar with a mirror taking up the wall behind it, where I’d watch myself do homework in the afternoon all during middle school. To the right was an open space in front of a real, if small, stage that Dad built. A place to perform his music whenever he wanted to. Ronnie Milsap had opened the Carolina Opry, Dolly Parton had a new dinner theater on Restaurant Row, the Dixie Stampede, an extravaganza of incorrect history on horseback. Nashville might come to him. He saw himself as part old-fashioned bartender, part sheriff, like in the Westerns he grew up with. The type of bar owner who could shoot the breeze with the regulars and just plain shoot the troublemakers. Who could entertain a crowd. Who wore shiny vests and bolo ties and sleeve garters. Maybe a costume would have improved some decisions. If you dress up to perform, maybe it is easier to remember who you are once you take it off. We’d have teased him for it, anyway, so it is probably best he kept to T-shirts and ball caps.
Dad’s initial excitement for anything new was infectious, and Mom kept right along, handing Jared, now toddling around off the oxygen tank, over to me to watch while she cleaned the whole place from top to bottom, picking out silverware and painting the walls. “What should we call the place?” Dad asked this of us on every car ride home once we started fixing the place up. My brothers and I would shout out names all at once, silly ones like the names given to the vacation beach houses on Ocean Boulevard. The Saloon. Dad’s Place. The Hurricane Hole. The Jukebox. The game shortened the car ride home, an hour or more up to Cherry Grove, inching along Restaurant Row in summertime traffic, passing more of Uncle Herman’s Calabash restaurants, like the one with the giant crab erected around its front door.
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