Low Country J. Jones (best books to read all time .txt) 📖

on small demons. This is a land where the languid Spanish moss sways on the strong arms of Southern live oaks that waltz in the kaleidoscopic heat haze, and the air is so thick, it holds up the whispers that would elsewhere collapse. The conditions are right. Continuity and silence, according to Wharton, and we’ve got plenty of both. Wachesaw, in the language of the Waccamaw tribe, means “place of great weeping.” Every place sees its share of tears. Then again, there are those places where the guilt is not glued down by the tree sap. In school each spring, my class took a field trip to Brookgreen Gardens, which lies to the south of Wachesaw in Murrells Inlet. It is advertised as a great sculpture garden. A Grand Strand attraction with a petting zoo for the kids and annual light festivals. I, too, am guilty of taking out-of-towners to spot alligators from pontoon boats and to walk between the electrified wings of oak-size butterflies. The grounds are an impressionist blur of moss green on gray and brown tree bark, azalea bushes in magentas and bubble-gum pinks, white marble and oxidized copper that ooze together atop the blue. Images and feelings evoked clearer than history. Naked Dianas hunting. A wood nymph here and there. Dionysus with some wine. Two stallions fighting in a fountain, for some reason. After one field trip, in the eighth grade, my history teacher divided the classroom into small groups, and after distributing buckets and sticks, we were instructed to imagine we were enslaved Africans pummeling the hull off rice, and yet I do not recall learning the legacy of the grounds. Not one, but four rice plantations owned by Joshua Ward, who is accounted the largest slaveholder in American history. On an 1860 ledger, among his estate’s holdings are listed 1,130 people in his possession. It is difficult to look at the marsh water, too dark for divining, and not feel the heaviness of tears, bodies, curses cast into its mud, even now which folks ignore between exhibits about the sculptures and wildlife.

We find ourselves next cruising through the flatlands of tobacco and cotton fields, with the swamps and their ghosts in the rearview mirror. Cue the Judds and Dwight Yoakam, Reba and Willie, Loretta and Conway. We all sang happily in and out of sync, never on or even near any key, until we passed the Columns, the white plantation outside Florence surrounded by trailers and locals sitting in beach chairs on their lawns with shotguns in their laps and Confederate flags disfiguring further such scenes. This was where the drippy moss disappeared from the tree limbs, and the air began to feel less fraught. The branches robed in webworms groped at the edges of the car here. One time Mom and I were driving at this point in the road under a sky that shone blue and rays of sun over one lane and poured rain across the other. “The devil must be beating his wife,” she said. Making it through this stretch, we came to the NASCAR racetrack in Darlington and could keep on with the deep and palliative croons of whoever was on the radio forever and ever amen until we pulled into Grandpa’s driveway in Charlotte. Before Mom could pull the key from the ignition, the boys and I bounded barefoot down the hill of rough, sun-hot driveway and into his arms. Who could pause to tie shoes with excited, clumsy fingers when he was waiting for us? Here I am feeling greedy for the next memory that I retrieve, rewind, and replay by choice for a change. One wherein I am enfolded in blissful safety and lifted spinning from the burning summer pavement as kid laugher floats over a chorus of cicadas and ice cubes clink the edges of a glass of bourbon. I was always the first to be picked up and held aloft. He smelled of the bourbon he drank out of a wax Dixie cup, vetiver-laced cologne, shoe leather, and oak trees, which were taller and whose limbs seemed to climb upward instead of in the crooked sprawl of home. Lightning bugs danced between dusky peach rays of twilight, and I kissed his cheek. I could taste the salt of sweat and feel his calm, openhearted authority.

Atop the red-brick patio, Grandpa stood in sagging khakis and canvas boat shoes and nothing else but his glasses. He clapped his hands together while we double-hopped the steps to reach him. “Hey, kiddos!” He pulled the phrase out as long as his arms, which were deeply tanned and damp with sweat. On these weekends, he never wore a shirt, and his stomach ballooned over the waistband of his pants. Again we pause on the vanity of men, which grows in step with success.

His one-story brick house was an odd arrangement of hallways and living rooms that led to bedrooms and centered around a kitchen. Despite its unusual shape, it was always lively on these visits. It was also a bona fide bachelor pad, complete with a wet bar, pool table, and hot tub. He was the only adult who regarded our input as valuable as a grown-up’s, while still indulging us in childhood. On summer mornings, he invited me to pick scuppernongs with him from the mass of grapevines that enshrouded a corner of his back porch. “What’s your favorite subject, kid?” His question was followed by a scuppernong seed that he spit into the yard. “English,” I said always, and my own scuppernong seed would fall just past my feet. He’d laugh and brush it off the side of the porch without a word. And as everybody else in the house slept in, we asked each other questions—Where did I want to go to college? What was his favorite country he’d ever been to?—and eat the vine clean.

These weekends were carefree ones of games of pool and darts in Grandpa’s living room. We pretended to pour scotch on