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

guitar case was made for the curve of my back. Smells of Camels, leather, and wood polish stayed on the fabric, softer and denser than Nana’s shag carpet. The metallic whiff left by the capo and the cash he kept rubber-banded in rolls behind a trap door in the neck of the case. While we were gone, he’d take out his earnings and rustle through the leafy bills, mostly ones, and spend it on whiskey and those copper energy bracelets that regulate the ions in your immune system and keep your aura fresh or some such. Around this time, he was working on a love song called “Sam Loves Sally,” a simple story about two teenagers falling in love. It never sold. The hard knocks that would give him his best material for the outlaw-country songs that did sell were still a few years away.

For my parents, still young and beautiful, three kids and a mortgage before thirty must have started to weigh. The novelty that buoys love had become worn. A life that belonged to their parents. Their friends in Nashville were childless couples whose nights were filled with jam sessions, juke joints, and cheap drugs laced with baking soda. The anticipation of the move united them in new possibility. Real estate is a known salve for marital staleness. They had never even been on a honeymoon, pregnant with me as they were. They’d eloped one weekend to the Great Smoky Mountains, and their witnesses were my uncle Leslie and his then-wife Linda. When they drove away in Dad’s white Mazda pickup truck, the newlyweds found the winding roads of October Appalachia flooded with a thick, impenetrable fog. They couldn’t see what was ahead, and so they stopped the car and waited. Dad, I’m sure, felt protective of his brand-new wife and his coming baby, with the imperative only a twenty-four-year-old man can feel, an emotion I have seen fire up and then pass in my brothers as they’ve hit twenty-five. Still I can’t help but see something in this approach to the unknown: their first journey as a family bound together by God and the law was too hesitant, too tentative to charge ahead. Their instinct was to idle and wait for a clear path, and they were young enough to expect the appearance of one. How do I know all this? From Nana, of course. She collected the love stories of everyone she knew like she did her romance novels.

On their house-hunting trips, heading up to Tennessee, they usually set off in the late afternoon, preferring always to drive at night. Even now, I attribute a preference for dawn departures to the childhood fear of pitch-dark drives through back-country roads. Looking out a window into shadows and tendrils of Spanish moss, which were comforting to me in the daylight, but too like the uneven, hanging robes of ghosts at night. Webworm tents transformed into groping hands after dark, and leaves caught midfall in the sticky gossamer could sometimes become the face of an evil plat-eye, the swamp ghost stolen and used carelessly by schoolchildren to scare. That last time they went to Nashville that spring of 1990, they’d already looked at a house they wanted to put an offer on. Things were being finalized. My parents plowed into this new decade, the one that felt like it was heading toward their true destiny, with all the determination they should have used to part that fog on the Blue Ridge Parkway back in 1982. Dad had lit out of our driveway with the unshakable confidence of a man who knows that fate’s got his back and his mom’s got the kids.

I remember being bored with the goodbyes. Mom’s blood-red canna flowers stretching toward the sun. Many years later, walking down a street in India, I caught sight of the exact shade of these canna flowers in the vermilion powder parting a married woman’s hair. Memory plays tricks like that. When you’re as far away from your past as you can possibly put yourself, that’s when some sound or smell taps into the senses and unexpectedly knocks you back to where you came from. But I remember also begging to go with them, Mom tucking me in one of the twin beds in the Boys’ Bedroom, the bed on the left where my great-grandmother May Ella died in her sleep when I was four. My only real memory of her is being held on the couch, thinking she looked like the oldest person on earth, and running away from her to hide behind the curtains. I can say I remember being held in the arms of a grandmother who was not counted a person enough to vote for the first third of her life. Dad had gone to get her for coffee, walking the length of Nana’s hallway, the one still lined with repaired wedding portraits, baby pictures, and half a dozen cross-stitchings of the “Serenity Prayer” surrounded by slightly too square Easter lilies. She’d gone to God sometime in the night. Unlike Grandpa, Granddaddy would have nothing so imaginative or uncontrollable as a ghost in his house, and May Ella has remained at rest, it seems, no doubt happy to be gone. She hated my Granddaddy, even after she moved in with them. She dipped snuff her whole life, and at the supper table, Granddaddy said as he watched her place tobacco behind her lip, “May Ella, none of the women in my family dip snuff.”

“Ralph, none of the men in my family are horse thieves,” she replied, the only one in the house who dared talk back. My dad and his brothers stared till food fell from their open mouths, and Granddaddy got up to leave the table.

Again, I’m convinced my memory has it wrong about the night my parents left. Why wasn’t I in the Doll Room? The night Mom kissed my forehead. “I want to go,” I hear myself. Never before did I care to