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

his arms. What did I tell yous, mixed in the rustle of bedding. I felt Dad’s hand, the one callused from guitar strings, on my head. For a second, it was the same motion as his patting the top of our collie’s head, but then his fingers laced through my hair and pulled. In this way, he pulled me off the bed and onto the floor. Never losing his grip, a good one right at the scalp, he dragged me through the door frame and into the den. My heels and my thighs burned from the friction as I moved across the rug. Twisting around, I saw my mother half naked and leaning against a wall, too weak to come any farther. She had answered the door in my place and now watched him struggle with himself.

He had tried so hard all his life to be better than the father who beat him senseless. He was the one who followed his mother around, willing protection on her through the power of his presence alone, and when that didn’t work, he grew up and fought back. I didn’t want to fight back. Consumed with grief and tired to the soul, Dad couldn’t help but fall into the ease of the oldest pattern he knew. Was this was what it meant to be a Jones? He seemed to find himself just in time, and he let me go with soothing sorrys and songs all afternoon. Though I’m sure I was mad, even then I realized that I knew him better for it. We were now more alike than he’d wanted us to be, and as he had done, too, I found solace as well as adventure and opportunity in putting words on paper. He had stopped singing like he used to after the wreck, but once Jared came home, after two months in the neonatal hospital, softly at first and then almost like his old self, Dad sang to his third son to the beeping metronome of the rented heart monitor and whirr of the oxygen tank. Just like Nana sang to us and to himself, “You Are My Sunshine.”

There is an alley in Charleston between Church and State Streets called officially Philadelphia Alley but known to most as Dueler’s Alley, where duels were held under the law until the 1880s. The walls are high and of red brick. Trees grow leggy to reach the sun and planters filled with tropical ferns and neon azalea line its narrowness. It connected to a graveyard, though that is no feat in a city as old as Charleston. Here went the honorable drunken men, gentle or not, to resolve their rows with pistols at dawn. Here we find the ghost of a young doctor among all the rest. A man from Rhode Island, Dr. Ladd, found room and board at the yellow house with the green shutters on Church Street, and so happy was Dr. Ladd here that Charlestonians knew him by his whistling. A friend became jealous of his popularity, and after a prolonged falling-out over things lost to time, challenged Dr. Ladd to a duel. He was shot in Dueler’s Alley, where translucent men and gunshots are oft heard, but died in the house on Church Street. For centuries since, Charlestonians have caught the ghost of Dr. Ladd whistling up and down Church Street, and in the darkness of Dueler’s Alley. The constant humming of Dad over Jared’s crib remind me of Dr. Ladd’s soft whistles, content-sounding but also eerie, not quite right. He wasn’t reachable is what it was.

Before Jared was a year old, my parents had to sell the little brown house in Conway to pay down the medical bills. There was no room for us at Nana’s house, already home to Uncle Mike and his sons. Grandpa let us move into a beach cottage he owned in Cherry Grove, on the north end of the Low Country. On our first night in Cherry Grove, Justin, Jason, and I followed an illuminated lane of mid-summer moonlight to the wooden steps leading down to the beach. It’s a strange patch of elevated Low Country, right next to the pier, in a region known for the appearance of straightforward flatness. Usually, even the outstretched arms of high tide stayed yards beyond the stairs, a sunbather’s sandy dream. That night, some unseen storm of low pressure beyond the horizon was met by the full moon’s arms so that the water and its waves swelled to storm-surge heights. We were drawn to the cusp of that veiled realm, as children in books are unable to resist forbidden forests and beckoning songs their parents cannot detect. It was a calm, clear night otherwise, but we knew our beaches intimately as beach kids do and could tell the greedy undulation of our normally placid water was not for swimming. We sat on the very top step practically still on North Ocean Boulevard, that’s how high the ocean reached, and we held tight to the wooden railing as warm water lifted our little brown bodies with the ease of wind tugging a feather. We giggled and screamed as the summer sea licked at our arms and faces and sucked at our toes, pulling at our whole selves as magnets pulled. We were giddy with feeling the power of what lay unseen and unsaid on our skin. Such a force was nearly singing with joy in a language I could not quite make out, and I imagined all the maidens and sailors ever lost at sea had thrown an underwater ball. This was not an angry sea, but one stretching for the pleasure of its own power like a cat upon waking. This was not the night for blood sacrifices, and as children are creatures connected by imagination to the unknown, we were blessed with a show just for us.

Soaking wet, we laughed our way across the boulevard, to the screened-in porch where Dad smoked and sang. I recall