Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  It was only a few weeks after my early-June birthday when the first storm of the season danced past our home, whisking over the whitecaps beyond the local pier and skimming the Outer Banks to the north of us. A sharp elbow to the gut of the Atlantic, awkwardly bumping into the faceless names that crowd the ocean floor. A for Arthur. Though technically within the bounds of the season, a hurricane in June was unusual enough to feel like an omen. I had cut out the hurricane chart the paper published every year on June 1, the first official day of hurricane season, and tacked it on the wall, as I did every year. I usually didn’t have to start marking latitudes and longitudes until the end of August. We often did it as a class assignment in the first weeks of a new school year, watching as our little crisscross marks of ink or colored pencil curved out from the bubble of western Africa. Hurricanes were tricksters, moody spirits, and just about the only thing you could count on was their changing course at the last minute. X marks the spot, we’d note on our tracking charts, where the eye came ashore, penciling its path from a school desk till the name disappeared, usually around Canada somewhere, under my name in the top right corner of the page. If the X fell close to us, we’d be at home on a hurricane day, unless it was a category four or five, and even then it depended. Most locals don’t feel like following the blue hurricane evacuation signs out of town, and storms like Hugo and Hazel were once-a-generation-type storms. Besides, it was harder to return than it was to leave. When you’re desperate to know if your house is still standing, the National Guard blocking the highway back to the only home you’ve known is not a sight to imbue patience in a population prone to temper.

  B for Bertha. I pretended to be asleep one morning about a month after Arthur, lying in my parents’ bed, Mom’s at that point, and listening to the Weather Channel. Mom slept with the TV on, when she slept at all, and I heard the hurricane watch issued for our county as I tried not to move. Meteorologists showed pictures of churning waters, and red warning flags flapped and seized against gray skies. They seemed excited. I was excited, too. I loved a good storm, and hurricanes were the best storms of all. As it was summer vacation, Bertha wouldn’t get us a day off school, but it was still something to look forward to. In a thunderstorm, you could feel the electricity in the air. The rumble of thunder. The crackle of lightning. Voluminous clouds that morphed and swirled messages from unknowable worlds, changing colors as fast as a mood ring. The power of it made my bones hum. I had never lost anything or anybody in a hurricane before, as generations past were so used to. Even families who had lost everything to wind and water—either loved ones or beloved home—remained stoic in the face of other storms. In a recent storm, a friend joked that he had left all his unwanted junk on the porch and the storm better blow it all away, ’cause he was so sick of looking at it.

  Dad came home one day with sheets of plywood, masking tape, and coils of rope. We had a day before Bertha would come ashore, in Little River, projected the men on TV. Mom stayed in bed with Jared, following the weather reports and avoiding my dad. When I got up from the bed, she asked me to close the door. Downstairs, Dad had rounded up Justin and Jason and started giving them instructions. Tie the bicycles in the backyard to the back porch so they don’t blow away. Clear the yard of Jared’s toys so they don’t blow away. Pick up fallen branches and fishing poles or anything else that looked like it might blow away and throw them in the pond in the woods out back. I taped big Xs on all the windows of the house, so the glass wouldn’t shatter if it was hit by toys forgotten in the grass or tree limbs flying through the air. When the official warning came down the day of, Little River was just on the south edge of the danger zone, the last county shaded red on the map, as the eye had shifted toward Wilmington. The Gray Man rested unseen, so there was nothing to worry about anyway. Mom had gone to the store for candles, matches, water, batteries, and other things we had requested in case we were without power and cable television for several days. Junk food and an extra pack of cards. Dad went to fill up on gas. They did everything separately except fight, and I was the most nervous when they said nothing to each other. It was almost but not quite like the air of Nana’s house when Granddaddy was home. Everybody knows that a reprieve from the winds too soon means the worst of the storm can return at any moment. The eye of the storm was always as quiet as our blue house.

  The day before Bertha was scheduled to come ashore, we all went to the beach. It is a tradition to go to the beach before a hurricane. We watched the waves grow fat and swollen and happy with what was to come. Surfers came to the beach before storms for this reason. The surf was normally too calm to ride, and a storm offshore meant better waves to catch. The feathery grass that covered the sand dunes twitched where it normally waved in slow sighs. Stores and restaurants had messages spray-painted on plywood covering their windows: GO HOME BIG BERTHA and BERTHA YOU COW. The winds were beginning to pick up, though just from looking at the sky, it looked like a perfect summer day. I remembered stories of bodies blown and washed into the branches of oak trees next to dangling and angry snakes, Medusa’s head come to life, though I may have read this in a book somewhere.

  We went from the beach to Nana’s house, where she told, as she always would before a storm threatened, the story of her biggest hurricane loss. She told this story before every tease or thrill of tropical weather, returning to the days after Hurricane Hazel from her rocking recliner with the view of the patio and magnolia tree. “My mama went through a nervous breakdown when she went through menopause, according to the doctors, so her family sent her down to a hospital in Charleston. I don’t think they do the shock treatment anymore, do they?” she asked me every time, long before I knew what shock treatment or menopause was, and so I said nothing and listened, as Dad paced on the patio with a cigarette and one or more of his brothers. Mom and my brothers and cousins were out of sight.

  “Well, her people were all from Florida originally, so when she got done in the hospital, she took the train from Florence to Florida. That was the night Hurricane Hazel hit. We didn’t know in advance in those days. My daddy was so upset. He was walkin’ between my sister Sue’s and my houses. We only lived a street away from each other, until finally we took the kids—your daddy wasn’t born yet—and we went down to the church to wait. He said, ‘It’s a sad thing when it takes a hurricane to get you in church.’ We’d all gone to the church basement that night.” She could have told the story about her neighbor’s call to warn her of Hazel’s approach, and their flight door-to-door to warn as many people as they could. It was a story she told every time we drove past Thirty-third Avenue, no matter the season. Never had she connected the stories, and what was lost for my not noticing until now?

  “The day Mama got back two weeks later, he had died in his sleep at about five o’clock that morning.” Still I sat silently, not knowing how to acknowledge the weight of her loss. She said to me, as she often did, “I bet you’re tired of hearing me talk.”

  “Nana, that’s why I ask, to listen to you talk,” I said.

  A lifetime of Granddaddy telling her to shut her mouth, telling us how stupid she was, had left her self-conscious of her stories. I grew hungrier to hear her voice as I got farther away from her. I regret to say that medical care for women in the South has little improved since May Ella was treated as insane for aging.

  Walking back to the car to head home, a gust of wind swept up just as I blew a large pink bubble in my gum, and I got to the house with a gob of it tangled in my hair. The first task of hunkering down for Bertha was Mom having to knead peanut butter into my scalp, pulling the bits of sticky, chewed gum from strands of my hair as the local news aired from the living room, hoping to get done before the lights went out. Bertha was expected to come ashore as a category two, which did not seem like too much to worry about. “Go upstairs and wash your hair again and then fill the bathtub with water. You remember what happened during Hugo,” Mom reminded us about the tap water. Not so bad, considering the catastrophes of others. We l
ost power but not so much as a tree.

  The sky was gray with Bertha when I woke up the next morning. This seemed like just the right kind of hurricane. Strong enough to be interesting, but too weak to do much damage. Maybe he just wanted something to think about besides his failing marriage, but Dad seemed happier than he had been. After breakfast, he set up a card table next to the front door with a view of the window, with a battery-powered radio and a deck of cards ready to shuffle. It had been a long time since we’d played gin. The rain started to fall. The wind became steady, blowing harder and harder throughout the day. By lunchtime, the rain had turned sideways and we were all out on the porch watching leaves and limbs tugged through the air, caught on something we couldn’t see. Mom brought blankets to wrap around us. The sustained winds made the wet July day feel winter-cold. We watched a group of seagulls try to fly against the wind. They were stuck at a fixed point in the sky, flapping without moving forward and looking slightly ridiculous as gusts fanned out their feathers and butted their heads.

  Inspired, my dad got up from his rocking chair, stepped off the front porch, and walked out into the gale. He looked up at the sky, apparently satisfied, and yelled for me and my brothers to join him. “Come on!” We looked at one another and bounded off the porch, leaving the blankets slumped on the rocking chairs and running into the rain. The wind pushed against us, and the drops of rain bore into my skin. “This is a game I played with my brothers,” he said, and explained the rules. You have to face the wind head-on, and the last person standing after everyone else has been blown down wins. I could barely hear my own laughter over the roar of the wind.

  When my brothers got back to their feet, our dad had reappeared with a kite from the garage. My mom looked down from the porch, wrapped in blankets and with Jared on her hip, and my dad released the green diamond-shaped kite. “Mark, be careful! Watch out for lightning!” she had to scream, her voice cracking. She looked like she was crying, though it was impossible to tell with the rain. But the sound of my mother’s heart breaking was louder than the freight-train sounds of the storm. Even now I hate the sound of my own voice cracking when I cry, when the tears come like the torrents of rain that fall for hours or days until the winds fizzle and the sky clears blue again and what’s left is only a tropical storm the next state over and fallen trees in the backyard, if you’re lucky. Because it sounds just like hers that day on the porch watching the kite buck and whirl in the sky. The pop of green flew through the gray sky, past the seagulls, who were still struggling. It was the same green as the stone on my mother’s engagement ring, which she was not wearing anymore, and the kite blew away, disappearing into the sea or the sky or the past forever.

  Late in the afternoon, the kite long gone and the rain just drizzle, Dad grew restless. “I’m gonna go see what the neighborhood looks like,” he announced, and I volunteered to go too. We got in the little silver sedan and drove along empty neighborhood streets and then turned onto the highway, also empty, taking in the damage. Some billboards had blown over and pine trees were either bending or snapped in half, but overall there wasn’t the devastation I remembered from Hugo. Homes stood their ground and there was little storm surge, certainly not half a mile inland. All the video-rental shops, grocery stores, and fireworks outlets were shuttered, so it was a surprise to come across a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall with the neon OPEN sign lit up. We pulled in, and the family who ran the place seemed as nonplussed as my dad. They’d kept everything running on their generator after the power went out. We headed back to the house with cartons of Chinese food, delighted at the fun of our unlikely discovery. In the hour that we had been gone, though, a roadblock had been set up across the highway, just before our neighborhood. “No, sir,” said the officer, unmoved. “We ain’t lettin’ nobody back in.” We parked the car at a nearby fireworks outlet and, angry and soaking, lugged our bags of takeout, no longer a treat but a liability, through soaking pine forest, in freezing silence, as if criminals in our own home, and come to think of it, it was probably an offense to cross the barrier that had been set up. We might have been hungry looters, after all.

  The wind was waning and summer warmth should have been returning with us, but our house had kept its unseasonable chill. The inconvenience of hauling noodles and stir-fry had dampened the mood, and Mom had already locked herself in her bedroom for the night. This was not what I had in mind, when I’d thought to offer our barroom mermaid to the ocean. I was too young still to understand the relief that came with endings, and kept from me was the gravity of my parents’ money problems. Still saddled with medical debt from the emergency of Mom’s last pregnancy, owing thousands of dollars in rent on the restaurant to Uncle Herman, who was nearly as stingy as Granddaddy, and nearing foreclosure, the only option was to beg for help from Grandpa. As generous as Granddaddy was greedy, he would not give as freely as he might once have. In paying off the little blue house in Little River, he gave the condition that we leave Myrtle Beach for good and move to Charlotte. If he was not a miser with his money, he knew how to make a deal. That was how he got rich in the first place. The strings he tied to his money reflected his own selfishness, moving his favorite child and her family close to him. Though I did not know the details yet, such offers imparted the sense that no matter how bad things got, there would always be a safety net in his outstretched hands, which also held his checkbook.

  By the time the storms got up to the Fs, in September of that year, we would be living down at Nana’s house. We sold the blue house to pay off the bank, or rather, my grandpa paid off the bank to stop the foreclosure. F for Fran, for foreclosure, for failing. What little we kept from our house ended up in a storage unit on the Little River side of the swing bridge. Hurricane Fran was forecast to hit Myrtle Beach dead-on as a category four, and for the first time, we evacuated. We packed up the alien-green minivan and drove to the safety of Grandpa’s house, leaving Dad behind at Nana’s house. They could tell Fran would wobble north at the last minute, as it did, and hit North Carolina harder than the Low Country. Fran remains the last strong storm to come ashore in the Carolinas, the last one to be ranked officially devastating, and our storage unit in Little River flooded to the rafters. The tide claimed what little was left of our family life.

  From the library at school, I filled out and mailed applications to better-looking schools in Charlotte. I hoped I would learn more than I had been. In my eighth-grade history class, for instance, we spent afternoons learning the words to the county fight song. “It’s ‘Horry’ not ‘Whore-y,’” the chorus counters what must have been a common misconception. We had to pretend to be among the enslaved Africans on a rice plantation after the annual field trip to Brookgreen Gardens. That year was the last for the old school building. A newly constructed one was about to open next door, and on a warm spring day at the very end of the year, the students showed up ready for Field Day, only to be lined up side-by-side in a chain hundreds of kids long. Under open sun, we passed the library books from the old building to the new one. I was not sorry to be leaving.

  Since this is the line in the road where I become a tourist in my own hometown, it’s a good time to expand here on Myrtle Beach’s becoming a tourist town to begin with. There is a good chance that you have been there and molded your own sandcastle from a yellow plastic tub as your mother misted you with a greasy spritz of coconut oil, or if you were fairer, slathered you with white SPF thick as shortening. That you have picked sandspurs out of your heels and stuffed yourself to bursting with popcorn shrimp and deep-fried flounder. If you have been there for spring break, well, your secrets are safe with me. I have better things to do than guess how many shots you’ve thrown back on a fake ID, or divine a future from the tan lines left fading across your back. They work truer than the palm, I believe.

  Myrtle Beach, you will remember, had been renamed by the richest lady in the county, though by now most of the wax myrtle bushes are long pulled from the sand for motel parking. If you are curious
about what the coast looked like then, try the Meher Baba ashram, as it is an officially designated wildlife sanctuary where humans may apply for brief refuge among the migratory herons of blue or white and nesting loggerhead sea turtles. I have long wished to glimpse them, these hatchlings like beating hearts in suits of armor who, on fluttering wings, emerge from where they were buried at the edge of life to shuffle over sand to the ocean that scoops them up and out to sea. What I have seen are the lines tracing their first moments left across moonlit sand toward the hem of high tide.

  Toward the end of that hurricane summer in 1996, Dad drove past motels with names like Windsurfer, Windjammer, Sea Gypsy and Sea Mist, the Captain’s Quarters and Paradise Resort, Camelot by the Sea and the Caravelle, past the Tropical Seas, and then the Mermaid Inn to move up to Emerald Isle, a sleepy family vacation town on the Outer Banks where he worked in Uncle Leslie’s construction company. Working was better than rehab, which we could not have afforded, anyway, and Mom was expected in Charlotte. We would finish the school year living at Nana’s house, and Mom was going to be Grandpa’s secretary at Carolina Time, enlisted into the family business of clockmaking. Once the construction job was over, Grandpa planned for Dad to manage a long-term parking lot next to the Charlotte airport that Grandpa owned, parking the cars of people on their way to see the world. We were all to live with him and his house ghost, Harvey.

  I took the prospect of leaving Myrtle Beach with more grace than my parents or brothers, though as naivety suffers more for its eagerness, I would be no different in my desire to return. Calls began coming in for Mom at Nana’s house. Schools with fancy names, Country Days and Latin Days and Christian Days, left messages requesting our summer schedule. My eyes widened with the guilty conscience of a kid just busted for secret schemes, but even more in disbelief that I was not going to be trapped after all. Education I had always known was my way out of town.