Dad picked me up from the airport, and on the ride to Myrtle Beach Hospital, tried to prepare me for how bad Granddaddy was. How he walked around for days with such a head injury was both strange and bad for the prognosis. They’d had to remove a part of his skull to ease the pressure on his swollen brain. In the hospital parking lot, the same one where he and Les waited for their granddaddy to die, he pulled out a CD from the console of his truck, and for the first time since we lived in Conway, he played me his songs and asked what I thought. A young singer who’d end up on the cover of every gossip magazine in Walmart sang his words on a demo called “The Devil in Me.” I could think only of Nana and her prayers. He had swiped her line and made it true. Granddaddy looked bad, tossing and turning, mumbling and groaning in pain. He’d spend six months in a rehab center after a recovery as mysterious as his fall. The first two weeks he was in the hospital, it didn’t look like he’d make it. Even after his head wound healed, he refused to eat anything and the doctors had to insert a feeding tube.
His brothers, the two still living then, came by to check in on him. Wilbur was coming down the hallway headed for the room one afternoon, when Granddaddy, perhaps sensing the approach of his brother, started mumbling about hiding the moonshine in the trunk and jumping in the car. “Hit the gas,” he said just as Wilbur walked in.
Wilbur paused in the doorway, looked at Granddaddy and then the nurses at their station behind him, as if afraid he’d been busted, and tiptoed backwards down the hallway without a word to us. Granddaddy murmured about being stuck in jail and about conquistadors who were stealing his gold. The spirit of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón landed anew. One morning I was sitting next to his hospital bed. As Jared, a grown man now, and Leslie were chatting in the doorway, Granddaddy stiffened and opened his eyes. Asleep or delirious since my arrival, he grabbed my arm and looked at me. With a gaze as clear as the highest-proof moonshine, he whispered, “Nicole, let me die.” He then dropped back into sleep.
Back at Nana’s house, the family sat around her recliner trying to figure out how he fell. Nana had been to the hospital every day, and acted always as a devastated and worried wife ought to. We all hoped he’d be the first to go, that she’d have a few years of freedom without his nasty cruelties, delivered regularly and without provocation. Too frail to smack her around anymore, he hurt her with unending insults and by banning her from their bedroom, where there’s a wall-size mirror next to the sink in the bathroom. Les and Dad kept going over the trail of blood found in his bathroom. Down the mirror and on the carpet, broken glass from a little table that fell with him. “There’s nothing for him to trip on back there,” I heard Les posit, and suddenly I imagined Nana, herself pushed too far after sixty years, pushing him down and then walking away. And I wanted her to have.
My brothers and I have a pact: we’ll never let any one of us get sent to a hospital in South Carolina, even if it means wrestling a gurney away from an EMT. I advise you, elicit the same promise from those you care about. We’re not quite done with Myrtle Beach hospitals, I am afraid. When I returned to New York after a week in Myrtle Beach preparing myself for his death, which against the odds didn’t occur then, I saw my healer in the railroad apartment. I didn’t know what to make of Granddaddy’s moment of lucidity. Had it even happened? Though I didn’t know what to make of this woman’s claims, I needed to talk about the fear in his eyes, how scared he seemed, and my own fear in nobody else having seen or heard him. “Yes, of course. He can tell you talk to ghosts,” she said, as if asked the time. I paid her and never went back.
Riding the subway one morning on the way to work, I was jolted by a sudden stop and my cheek smacked hard into a metal wall. I tried my hardest not to cry, but tears of pain began to fall down my swelling cheek. By the time I reached the office where I spent hours correcting the spelling in cookbooks and science-fiction novels, my eye was nearly swollen shut underneath a glaze of tears. My black eye drew looks from strangers, sympathy and scorn, I imagined, and even to my friends, the truth sounded lame and false. I thought of my nana, and how just a few years before, surgery to relieve pain in her ear had left her with a black eye and hearing loss on the one side, which was not the intended outcome. I suggested we go out for breakfast when she was nearly recovered, the eye and cheek yellow instead of purple, to Aikel’s or the Pancake House, or that we take a walk on the beach. Her refusal, unusually adamant, felt laced with shame. She must have known enough the looks of concern and judgment going about your day will get you with a black eye. What excuses did she use when she couldn’t hide her bruises? Back in my apartment, I hoped again that Nana had pushed Granddaddy down.
He moved into a nursing home for a few months. I went down again to visit. Nana went to see him every day, ever dutiful. She brought his favorite pears and fruitcakes. Brought his mail and phone messages she had taken. Brought him clothes and magazines he asked for. One day, she walked in and noticed something she had not brought him.
“Ralph, are the nurses mixing up your laundry?”
“Jackie, why are you here, I told you not to come by today. Ain’t nobody wants to see you here.”
“What are you wearing?” She was mad now. The intuition of the wounded kicked in.
He had a standing date with F at the nursing home, and clothed himself in the things she brought for their reunions. From the car, Nana called Les in tears.
“What do you want me to do, Mama? I been telling you just like everybody else to divorce him.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I don’t see why not. I’ll drive you down to the courthouse myself.”
She brought him his mail the next day like all the others. Against some odds and wishes, Granddaddy recovered enough to return to Nana’s house on Calhoun Road, by then truly her house, just as her grandchildren had always called it. After the failure of the Amphitheater, Granddaddy had to sign the house over to her ownership so his creditors wouldn’t be able to claim it.
If you are from Beaufort, it is likely that you have heard the story of little Julia Legare. If she had been born in our century, she might have been a pageant queen with her breeding. Before she was just another affluent girl carried away by a mosquito bite, Julia was a child of her time, which was the early 1800s. From her home in Edisto, south of Murrells Inlet, she learned her letters, went to church, embroidered Bible verses. Whatever it was that affluent young ladies did at that time. She might have had tea with Eliza Pinckney, the indigo grower. There would be no chores for her. Little schooling. Very little life at all, sadly. She was buried in the family mausoleum in Edisto Beach, which draws visitors even now. Tourists and teenagers, mostly. When the marble door to the mausoleum was opened after the next death in the family, more than a decade later by most accounts, the grieving family found the body of little Julia not in her grave but beside the door, which has never again been closed despite some effort. After trying to lock, deadbolt, or otherwise chain the portal closed and finding it reopened in the daylight, the family gave up and just left it open for Julia to roam free as she likes, as free as any man living and the spirit of any woman dead.
From her rocking chair, Nana told me over and over the story of Alice, of the Flagg Flood, and many others. Read from her books on the coffee table and from memory. She told only one story about her granny, but it is a real gem among them. This is the granny who had fifteen children. Nana’s mother, May Ella, was the mystical seventh, the first daughter who was herself heard to proclaim that she’d rather have a heart attack than another baby after her children were born, which is what she died from, after all. The favorite pastime of Granny, my great-great-grandmother, was sewing over and over a funeral shroud for herself. From whatever scraps of white fabric she could find, she made shroud after shroud. After completing each one, she’d ask one of her children or grandchildren what they thought about this one and then the next. No matter their reply, every time she undid the stitches and tore out the thread. May Ella worked at the Air
Force Base during World War II and even brought her mother some yards of fine white parachute silk to be cut and recut, joined and torn open as she pleased. Once her children and grandchildren were grown, this was how she spent her days, waiting to wrap herself in white silk that must have been finer than whatever she was married in. I could take it to mean that she felt her work was done, her children born, alive, and grown, so what was there left for a woman to do but die. In some grief for this woman I didn’t know, my heartbreak for a grandmother who obsessed over her grave clothes for decades, I want to see the possibility that this repetition was some final act of subversion. Here was a gift of luxury and selfishness just for herself. In the precision of stitches, some sense of control. She chose to wrap herself in a life of her own making.
It is neither as straightforward nor as metaphorical as I want. How can I heal all of these women, my grandmamas going back to one flood or another? It hardly matters which, there have been so many. A parable so perfect that Jesus could not have done it better than my nana. Maybe he did, but I confess that I have never read the good book and have no plans to in the future. I am choosing the stories from the mouths of women, some painted and some bare, and as far as I am concerned, their words are all the truer for the color. I am also putting off what I cannot bear to lose for good, and like a hurricane, I will change tack without warning.
The ghost of Theodosia Burr keeps me company in New York. She is seen in the finest translucent fabric descending in ethereal grace to earth via staircase, of all vehicles, in an old townhouse on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. Women report their earrings pulled at by her, as if to say, Listen. Or, just, These would look better on me. Did you know some claim that Theodosia’s ghost walks along the Grand Strand in search of her father? Rumors run amok, I say. If she is not by her husband in Brookgreen Gardens, and why would she be, what had she to keep her tied to Ocean Boulevard? I will keep Theodosia in New York, where her presence makes sense, where it follows the rules. That is not her walking up and down the beach of the Low Country enjoying the sun of a New Year’s Day in a pink bikini top.
12
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The Gray Man
THERE IS ONE LAST GREAT HURRICANE WHOSE winds will blow through these pages. The Flagg Flood of 1893 is occasionally mistaken for the Mermaid Storm of 1881. Allow me to set the record straight. Yes, we are once again among the Flagg family, with one of Alice’s brothers, in fact. Not Allard, the brute who sent her away from her lover and induced the attack of heartbreak that killed her, but Arthur, who has not long to live at the moment. In the book of folktales Nana kept on her coffee table, the one whose cover is laced with live oak limbs and drooping moss, the story is told as if from the perspective of the only survivor, Arthur’s son Joshua Ward Flagg. The same Wards who claimed the most enslaved people in America before the Civil War. It was an October Friday. A Friday the thirteenth, believe it or not, and the Flagg family had relocated to their oceanfront estate on Magnolia Beach, known today as Huntington Beach, near to their Pawley’s Island home, to bear the final weeks of summery heat with the seaside breezes that kept the malarial mosquitos away. The strongest winds of the hurricane came in suddenly that morning following several days of storms. The sand and marsh were already soaked and ready to flood. The day the ocean and the creek embraced, that is what some still call the Flagg Flood, which is also deemed the Magnolia Beach Disaster in a newspaper account to mark its fortieth anniversary, in 1933. By the time the Flaggs realized they needed to reach higher ground, the marsh creek was too dangerous to cross and they were stuck. They spent some hours in their attic, before riding a piece of the roof to the top of a cedar tree where some of their servants clung. The winds are described as “sand-laden” that cut “flesh like sharp pieces of glass.” A cousin called Allard was last seen holding his cat and floating away on the roof of the kitchen as his horse swam behind him. By one o’clock that afternoon, so say one of three survivors from the household, the sky was the perfect clear blue that I know myself and the sea lay calm and flat. Dr. Arthur, his wife, three of their children, and a handful of unlucky cousins visiting for the season were drowned along with hundreds of others. If only the Flaggs had heard that the Gray Man had been seen walking the beach of Pawley’s Island.
In the Georgetown Museum, this unnamed family is quoted as believing the Gray Man saved their lives and protected their home. If I were writing that story, I would include a ring on a ribbon, like that of poor ghostly Alice Flagg, washing up among the debris, in perfect and mysterious, some might say vindictive, condition. In the graveyard at All Saints Episcopal, in the Flagg plot, be sure to find the memorial to the rest of the family since we have already visited the flat marble stone marked only ALICE that most tourists are so eager to spot. On a dirt-and-moss-covered obelisk, a lengthy inscription has been carved in loving memory of “those lost in the storm on October 13th, 1893.” I have heard it told that Alice Flagg perished not from heartbreak or fever, but in the tidal wave that killed most of her family. As you and I know, such stories are flat wrong. She was looking for her ring decades before the storm of 1893.
In 2012, on the last day of summer, the season of disasters and catastrophes, my brother Jason called me first to say that Grandpa had a stroke and wasn’t expected to live until morning. I stayed awake all night waiting for the predawn flight. I imagined conversations with him in my empty apartment. I whispered aloud, “Please don’t go.” And then, “If you have to go on your own adventure now, don’t worry about me.” The power went out just as my lips closed. It came back after a minute or more, but my alarm clock blinked the time in red like the plat-eyes I would be so scared to see in the woods at night. Jason called to say he was gone. I could only say “One thirty-two” over and over again, until my brother, through his own tears, whispered, “How did you know?” Had he dispatched Harvey or played the trick himself? We will all be ghosts one day, if we are lucky.
The airport in Charlotte was the last place I saw Grandpa alive, which seems the way it was supposed to be after a friendship started with the spin of a globe. He dropped me off, as he always did, and I flew back to New York, where I stayed after graduate school. He always picked me up when I returned as well, waiting just beyond the designated line to lift me up in a hug and spin me around with the joy of reunion, as he had done in his driveway so many times. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer my last year at graduate school in New York, after smoking since his second-grade teacher offered him a cigarette, and, as I had in college, I was returning to Charlotte most weekends to spend time with him. Our shared faith in the power of education was not in vain, it turned out. I landed a prestigious internship with ease, and was lucky enough to get writing and editing jobs right out of school. I got a callback for a job at a glossy magazine as we said our goodbyes, final it would turn out. “I knew you could do it.” He picked me up off the curb and spun me around like I was five years old again, barefoot and beaming in his driveway.
I had not yet lost anyone important and did not know what to expect from grief. I did not expect, as I should have, to be helpless in the face of magical thinking, to find comfort in the logic of ghosts I had left in childhood. I heard his voice everywhere. It called to me at the oddest of times. I heard it first the day after he died. Mom was suddenly in charge of his business, Carolina Time, and had to account for the valuable things left behind. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, and there I was sitting at a round plastic table with Mom counting out foot-tall stacks of cash and taking an inventory of guns and jewels. It was as if a pirate’s treasure chest had exploded. In silence, we counted out close to fifty thousand dollars and tallied up watches and diamond rings and rifles and Glocks. I heard my name spoken so clearly in his voice that I knocked my stack of bills to the floor in shock, jerking around expecting to meet his gaze. I heard his voice as clearly as I heard the footsteps of Harvey.
I felt alone with a grief heavy and new, adrift without his reassurances that I belon
ged wherever I chose. Without the blessing of belief and the reassurance of his experience, I could not strip the old feeling that I wore a costume. Dressed up to match the fellow commuters on crowded subways, the cloak of an educated professional was one I wore willingly and more easily than sequins and plastic tiaras. If I was not quite free of family patterns or ghosts from a region whose values I considered backward even before I realized it, no officer of the law of men could force me to turn around and return to a life of captivity. Friends encouraged me to have more fun and to forget after I abandoned them at bars without warning when I thought again that I had heard his voice saying my name and had to excuse myself mid-conversation. Was he calling to me from wherever he had traveled, or were the well-trodden footpaths of habit traced across my memory in our daily conversations simply starting to grow over unused? Would they stop if I painted my ceiling blue, and would I want them to? One forgettable day, they stopped.
With money that Mom inherited from Grandpa, she and Dad bought a farm near Nashville that they have filled with rescue llamas. Grandpa after death had blessed Mom with what she wanted back most, which was her marriage. Dad came to the funeral and has never strayed from her since. It’s a red-stained log cabin, the Llama Farm my parents call it, with a baby grand piano and a wide porch on forty rolling acres. They let a neighbor graze his cows and horses on their land, and it feels there as if time moves slower and the heartbeat tremolos of Carolina wrens duet just as they did in Nana’s backyard. There’s only one llama left living now, down from six when they first started. Black snakes sun in zigzags over the wooden fence, and a couple of circus ponies are picked on by the horses. Old Conway died, but they now have two new dogs, Waylon and Loretta. The first spring they had the place, Dad found himself at midnight driving to his office in Nashville. It was burning down. On the news the next day, I watched firefighters in yellow hats and yellow coats hand Dad his guitars and songbooks as the flames danced around them in the porch until the sun came up. That’s the thing about fire. It sucks up all the air in fantasies.
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