Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

followed the son of one of his victims, Vengeance: The Story of Tony Cimo, aired in 1991. She and the other jurors were sequestered at a roadside motel next to the courthouse in Conway. The day she got picked for duty, the sheriff, Junior Brown, escorted her home from the courthouse and told her to pack a suitcase under his supervision. He wouldn’t let her talk to anybody.

“Les, you know I can’t talk to you about it, son.” Her voice stretched high when she got upset. The trial itself had been years ago, but she maintained that she could not breach confidence, though I suspect it was an excuse not to talk about it. Not to think about it even a little. She told me that the only time she feared for her life was in the room with Rudolph Tyner.

“He was a mean fella and he just stared right at you.” My uncle had her going now. “He was guilty as I don’t know what. I watched their son, that Tony Cimo, go at that New York boy Tyner right in the courtroom. Just jumped at him. But now once he got put on death row, you remember what happened?” she was asking her sons, but I was wide-eyed and hooked.

Tyner would be murdered on death row by the most famous serial killer the state has yet produced, a man who claimed before his execution to have raped and murdered at least a hundred women. The first woman he abducted was a hitchhiker. He left her for dead in a swamp, though she was living still and managed to crawl out, and he boasted it was the best night of his life. “Well, Pee Wee Gaskins, he was already on death row.” She had her storytelling rhythm going, matching her sentences with the rocks of her chair. “He was a real famous serial killer. And this boy Tony Cimo hired him to kill Tyner before he was supposed to be executed by the state. Now, Gaskins had this radio that Tyner was always asking to borrow. I guess he must have heard him playing it from his cell. Well, Gaskins fixed this radio up as a bomb, and when Tyner turned it on, it exploded and killed him. Blew his head off, I reckon.”

Nobody was listening except me, I realized. Dad and his brothers had asked her about it, and then gone outside to check on the boys. I knew they had really gone out for cigarettes. How different would her stories have been if she’d had girls instead of more Jones boys? Would the repetitions she was asked for be less violent? She must have known that I was always listening to her even then. “You don’t want to hear me talk so much,” she said on the phone, after years of Granddaddy’s abuses and her sons’ walking away. “Nana, that’s why I call.” Remembering is survival, and beauty the easiest faith.

I walked back to the Doll Room to change clothes. “I started collecting because I never had any daughters,” she told me, the longing still in her voice forty years after she started collecting these dolls in the mid-1970s. Her friend Tommy took her to a showroom up in Columbia, where, surrounded by stick-straight models of costumed, expressionless, and tiny women, something clicked for her and she filled an empty bedroom with walls full of them. These dolls were shells as empty as the whelks my hermit crab outgrew, but to her each one was a life she might have had, a crinolined cipher into which she could imagine an escape. By the time I was born, she had hundreds of them displayed in glass cases lining the walls of the Doll Room, a bedroom that, when her boys were old enough and she had abandoned her dream of daughters, she carpeted in the shag of the era in pink. A deep near-purple orchid. The walls were not papered, but they might as well have been done up in yellow. The love seat was a print of butterflies and flowers, and sat under the brief window that separated the two display cases filled with the other lives she might have led. There were the president’s wives. A series of fairy-tale girls, their size and form no different than the grown women like Mrs. Lincoln. Little Red Riding Hood with her tiny wicker basket, and Cinderella, who wore blue. The dolls were a small liberty for Nana, though they felt sad and caged to me. Nana sometimes bought two of the same doll, one for her and one for me. On top of the carbon-copy collection she was giving me, she reminded me consistently that I would inherit hers one day. “I don’t know what you’re gonna do with all these dolls,” she’d say.

Did going back over this violence she was summoned to judge make her feel safer? I wonder. What she suffered was nothing compared with the bloody evidence left behind by murderers and serial killers. At least her husband was not a killer. I imagine she also liked being treated as an adult. Having a job, however gruesome, after being forced to quit hers as a bank teller decades before just because my granddaddy wouldn’t have a wife of his working. Jury duty gave her a real reason to leave her house.

One raining gray day after school, Mom drove us to a seamstress’s house. I looked out the window, noting that the blur of pinewoods flying past was only broken up by trailers and the strewn contents of their yards. Faded plastic wading pools filled with fallen leaves, a few painted wooden signs with PSYCHIC or PALM READING painted on, and speedboats propped upon cinder blocks in the yards. The drizzle had not let up, and a favorite thing to do when it was raining and Mom was speeding was to roll the window halfway down and stick my hand out, to feel the drops of