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

of his truck, and for the first time since we lived in Conway, he played me his songs and asked what I thought. A young singer who’d end up on the cover of every gossip magazine in Walmart sang his words on a demo called “The Devil in Me.” I could think only of Nana and her prayers. He had swiped her line and made it true. Granddaddy looked bad, tossing and turning, mumbling and groaning in pain. He’d spend six months in a rehab center after a recovery as mysterious as his fall. The first two weeks he was in the hospital, it didn’t look like he’d make it. Even after his head wound healed, he refused to eat anything and the doctors had to insert a feeding tube.

His brothers, the two still living then, came by to check in on him. Wilbur was coming down the hallway headed for the room one afternoon, when Granddaddy, perhaps sensing the approach of his brother, started mumbling about hiding the moonshine in the trunk and jumping in the car. “Hit the gas,” he said just as Wilbur walked in.

Wilbur paused in the doorway, looked at Granddaddy and then the nurses at their station behind him, as if afraid he’d been busted, and tiptoed backwards down the hallway without a word to us. Granddaddy murmured about being stuck in jail and about conquistadors who were stealing his gold. The spirit of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón landed anew. One morning I was sitting next to his hospital bed. As Jared, a grown man now, and Leslie were chatting in the doorway, Granddaddy stiffened and opened his eyes. Asleep or delirious since my arrival, he grabbed my arm and looked at me. With a gaze as clear as the highest-proof moonshine, he whispered, “Nicole, let me die.” He then dropped back into sleep.

Back at Nana’s house, the family sat around her recliner trying to figure out how he fell. Nana had been to the hospital every day, and acted always as a devastated and worried wife ought to. We all hoped he’d be the first to go, that she’d have a few years of freedom without his nasty cruelties, delivered regularly and without provocation. Too frail to smack her around anymore, he hurt her with unending insults and by banning her from their bedroom, where there’s a wall-size mirror next to the sink in the bathroom. Les and Dad kept going over the trail of blood found in his bathroom. Down the mirror and on the carpet, broken glass from a little table that fell with him. “There’s nothing for him to trip on back there,” I heard Les posit, and suddenly I imagined Nana, herself pushed too far after sixty years, pushing him down and then walking away. And I wanted her to have.

My brothers and I have a pact: we’ll never let any one of us get sent to a hospital in South Carolina, even if it means wrestling a gurney away from an EMT. I advise you, elicit the same promise from those you care about. We’re not quite done with Myrtle Beach hospitals, I am afraid. When I returned to New York after a week in Myrtle Beach preparing myself for his death, which against the odds didn’t occur then, I saw my healer in the railroad apartment. I didn’t know what to make of Granddaddy’s moment of lucidity. Had it even happened? Though I didn’t know what to make of this woman’s claims, I needed to talk about the fear in his eyes, how scared he seemed, and my own fear in nobody else having seen or heard him. “Yes, of course. He can tell you talk to ghosts,” she said, as if asked the time. I paid her and never went back.

Riding the subway one morning on the way to work, I was jolted by a sudden stop and my cheek smacked hard into a metal wall. I tried my hardest not to cry, but tears of pain began to fall down my swelling cheek. By the time I reached the office where I spent hours correcting the spelling in cookbooks and science-fiction novels, my eye was nearly swollen shut underneath a glaze of tears. My black eye drew looks from strangers, sympathy and scorn, I imagined, and even to my friends, the truth sounded lame and false. I thought of my nana, and how just a few years before, surgery to relieve pain in her ear had left her with a black eye and hearing loss on the one side, which was not the intended outcome. I suggested we go out for breakfast when she was nearly recovered, the eye and cheek yellow instead of purple, to Aikel’s or the Pancake House, or that we take a walk on the beach. Her refusal, unusually adamant, felt laced with shame. She must have known enough the looks of concern and judgment going about your day will get you with a black eye. What excuses did she use when she couldn’t hide her bruises? Back in my apartment, I hoped again that Nana had pushed Granddaddy down.

He moved into a nursing home for a few months. I went down again to visit. Nana went to see him every day, ever dutiful. She brought his favorite pears and fruitcakes. Brought his mail and phone messages she had taken. Brought him clothes and magazines he asked for. One day, she walked in and noticed something she had not brought him.

“Ralph, are the nurses mixing up your laundry?”

“Jackie, why are you here, I told you not to come by today. Ain’t nobody wants to see you here.”

“What are you wearing?” She was mad now. The intuition of the wounded kicked in.

He had a standing date with F at the nursing home, and clothed himself in the things she brought for their reunions. From the car, Nana called Les in tears.

“What do you want me to do, Mama? I been telling you just