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

the rocks into wax-paper Dixie cups. Enjoying pretend games of doing what men did. We slept in Mom’s old bedroom, starting out on floor pallets, and in a rush of fear in the presence of invisible forces, hair on limbs stood up as our dog’s would in a thunderstorm. You see, we woke every night to footsteps pacing back and forth in the attic above the bedroom and the hallway. Mom heard them, too, and just how active the ghost was on nights was the usual breakfast conversation. Here, ghosts were not stories or threats, but were heard, felt, acknowledged by the adults as real.

There was no doubt that the sounds that woke us were footsteps, the heel-toe thud-tap of a man’s heavy shoes laid down to a remembered heartbeat rhythm. Some nights they would start in the attic and then sound suddenly in the brick hallway just outside our door. Grandpa bragged that he had the ability to communicate with spirits, as Dad had with dogs, and named his house ghost Harvey, like the invisible rabbit from the Jimmy Stewart movie. Though he loved to tease us as grandfathers do, and was as rational-minded as any engineer on most counts, he claimed to share his home with Harvey, having first surmised the presence of something supernatural in the house after he and his four children, then teenagers, had barely moved in. He had woken one night to his bed shaking violently and the indentation of a figure lying next to him in the sheets. He said that he was never so scared as that initial encounter, not even when piloting planes in the Air Force. He jumped out of bed and flew through the front door and drove to his office to wait for sunrise, still wearing only underwear. At three a.m., he left his four sleeping children alone to deal with whatever it was, until he came home and had a long talk with the ghost. It was his house first, after all, and Grandpa’s prevailing instinct was always to befriend. If ever we were left alone, he always said, “Don’t be scared. Harvey will look after you.”

An aunt told stories of Harvey’s most disruptive years of haunting, when he unlocked and swung open the bathroom door when she was showering or otherwise naked. “Don’t worry about Harvey,” she said to me, in a line of half tease, half comfort. “He’s not mean. He’s just a pervert.” Even in death, this man could not keep his eyes and hands to himself, and I was advised to put up with his harassment because it was felt to be good-natured. Boys will be boys, even in the afterlife. Were his groping ministrations on this side of the grave, I had a feeling my aunt’s advice would be about the same, which bothered me more than the peeping habits of some lecherous old ghost. The air in the house did seem peculiar. Thinner. As if I could fall right through it and straight into another dimension.

Grandpa talked aloud to Harvey when they were alone, but I listened from behind corner walls, usually when he rolled biscuit dough or mixed pancake batter at the kitchen counter in the mornings. He most often spoke to Harvey after his kids returned to their homes, to fill the silence of an empty house. He believed Harvey saved his life one night, making amends for the night he scared him out of bed. The oven was turned on by his teenage son, who then fell asleep. As Grandpa told it, Harvey woke him with a clattering of pots and pans and cabinet doors until he got out of bed and discovered half the kitchen in licking, hungry flames. One evening, after watching young people sing and cry standing over a crumbling wall, Grandpa showed me the cities and countries from the news on the globe that stood by his bookcase. It must have been early winter 1989. Running my fingers over the raised bumps of mountain chains and the plastic line of the equator, the world seemed available to me for the first time.

If a hurricane can pick up a house and put it down whole in the next county, their swirling winds can take us back two months with ease. Their winds blow counterclockwise, after all, practically made for time travel. A different ghost has warned of disaster, and we must return to Myrtle Beach. In September 1989, the Gray Man had been spotted in Pawley’s Island by more than one witness. South Carolina was preparing for the biggest hurricane since Hazel. Looking at my Rand McNally map, I could see where Hugo had blown off the violet coast of Africa and was swirling like a carnival carriage across the Atlantic, and the Gray Man had a better track record than the weatherman. Forgive my manners, but I will only tease a cordial introduction until the appointed hour of our own sighting within these pages. His true identity is unknown, anyway. Who was he before he was a solemn apparition that walks the beaches of Pawley’s Island as a warning to residents to flee, to go, to live? There are several different stories, and when the time is right, you may choose whichever suits.

Everybody knows that things are about to get serious when the Gray Man shows up, and folks who wouldn’t dream of evacuating their beachfront property when the State Guard knocks on their door, as they did before Hugo, saying essentially, “If you’re gonna ride it out, you’ve gotta sign away government blame if either home or life is lost,” will pack a bag and follow the blue-spiral evacuation-route signs all the way to Appalachia. They’ll do that if word gets out that he’s been walking the shore. Though, they say if you see him, your house will be spared, and you have only to see a strip of shore the day after a storm to know the truth. There are always a