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

I used to think I learned storytelling from my dad. From the country-music songs he wrote and sang all day and the tall tales of the Low Country that he told us each night. On forests’ worth of sunny yellow legal pads, under the sacred porcelain gaze of an Elvis Presley bust looking down from his bookshelf on high, Dad wrote as I sat on the carpet and waited for him to sing and ask, “What do you think, baby?” Between the pirate legends and ghost stories, the fairy tales of my childhood were his verses about bad luck and lonesome women, and I could see the stories become reality in the women I loved but did not want to be like. In the evening hours, my brothers and I filled Mason jars with lightning bugs to keep as night-lights after the candles were blown out so Dad could chase the neon lights of fame, playing low-ceilinged honky-tonks up and down the Carolinas and sometimes into Georgia. When I woke each morning, Dad was always sleeping the deep sleep of whiskey and defeat on the couch with his cowboy boots still on, his guitar in its case by the door, and my lightning bugs upside down with suffocation in the grass at the bottom of their jars. Years later, home from college and about to leave the South for good, I found that Elvis bust in a cabinet. Picking it up for the first time, I saw that it was a bourbon decanter and not a golden calf. That we had been praying to the alcohol all along explained a few things.

I know now that I was already filled with the stories of women. From my mom, I learned how to live with a broken heart, as she knew from hers. Nothing will wreck a marriage like the horizon. Mom tried to anchor Dad to her in all the usual ways a woman tries. Powdered cheekbones, sea-green eyes done up to glitter, auburn hair scorched into mermaid waves. She dressed the part of a country-music star’s wife before he was half famous. Fringe, sequins, shoulder pads. Sparkles are a sure sign of magic, and I thought she was more beautiful than Dolly Parton in that skintight, hot-pink number from the Dolly show. Any costume suited her figure, which even after a litter of kids and a diet of food-stamp fare, retained the perfect and irresistible curves of a guitar. There’s nothing so attractive as symmetry. I read somewhere that writing a song is like building a house, which I reckon rings true. Our family has lived in a lot of houses over the years. Only one of them burned down, and most of the guitars made it out all right. A little singed is still fine playing shape.

Dad left us to move to Nashville more than a few times, and he came back every time but one. He spent the 1980s and ’90s trying to sell himself to the executives on Music Row, leaving orphan cassette-tape demos tucked inside wicker baskets on their doorsteps. I began telling my own bedtime stories. From Myrtle Beach, he could afford the trip to Tennessee only once or twice a year. While he worked in the family’s motels and restaurants, he saw his buddies in Nashville wind up with record deals and writing contracts. He finally chose music over us for good, and after decades of being told he’d never make it, he made it big in what they call outlaw country, the inevitable genre for the descendant of bootleggers and gamblers. Dad and I sang Hank Williams songs to each other in the car, and it is Hank Williams Jr. who sings his songs now. I will tell you that it is disorienting to hear a stranger sing about your life on the radio. Even if we once were the people in those verses, radio always beats reality.

As is Southern tradition, and the premise of most classic country-music duets, my parents separated and reconciled at least a dozen times before and after their divorce. The drinks, the golden rings, and the kids add up to something, but failure pulls on a man’s heart stronger than guilt or love. Once he got to Nashville, he’d given himself the ultimate heartache to sing about. He’d lost his family, and I can’t let alone the wondering: Do we have our stories because of the songs? If Dad were not a country-music singer, would there have been all the drinking and the cheating? The violence and the making up? At least the bills might have been paid on time. The South does not own tragedy, but it sure seems to have taken a liking to the region. And why not? The climate’s pleasant, and the folks are nice enough to your face. There’s an ice machine down the hallway beside the elevator, and pet hermit crabs are ninety-nine cents apiece when you buy a beach towel. I had one I called Periwinkle, and she lived for years in a plastic aquarium filled with little rocks the same synthetic cerulean blue of the water falling from fiberglass rocks at every single mini-golf course. It’s true nobody minds her own business, but why would you want to keep quiet when gossip comes with a fat slice of pound cake and a blessing offered to offending hearts.

We’ll start with a story about Uncle Jack, because when the mythology’s run as dry as the county used to be, there’s always one more story about my great-uncle Jack. In 1985, four years before Hurricane Hugo and with three kids under three, my parents moved to Conway, South Carolina, barely inland from Myrtle Beach. Dad was driving to Murrells Inlet to tend bar for the night at Drunken Jack’s, named for a different Jack, whom we will get to in due time. He’s cruising down Highway 544 in