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

the attack of heartbreak that killed her, but Arthur, who has not long to live at the moment. In the book of folktales Nana kept on her coffee table, the one whose cover is laced with live oak limbs and drooping moss, the story is told as if from the perspective of the only survivor, Arthur’s son Joshua Ward Flagg. The same Wards who claimed the most enslaved people in America before the Civil War. It was an October Friday. A Friday the thirteenth, believe it or not, and the Flagg family had relocated to their oceanfront estate on Magnolia Beach, known today as Huntington Beach, near to their Pawley’s Island home, to bear the final weeks of summery heat with the seaside breezes that kept the malarial mosquitos away. The strongest winds of the hurricane came in suddenly that morning following several days of storms. The sand and marsh were already soaked and ready to flood. The day the ocean and the creek embraced, that is what some still call the Flagg Flood, which is also deemed the Magnolia Beach Disaster in a newspaper account to mark its fortieth anniversary, in 1933. By the time the Flaggs realized they needed to reach higher ground, the marsh creek was too dangerous to cross and they were stuck. They spent some hours in their attic, before riding a piece of the roof to the top of a cedar tree where some of their servants clung. The winds are described as “sand-laden” that cut “flesh like sharp pieces of glass.” A cousin called Allard was last seen holding his cat and floating away on the roof of the kitchen as his horse swam behind him. By one o’clock that afternoon, so say one of three survivors from the household, the sky was the perfect clear blue that I know myself and the sea lay calm and flat. Dr. Arthur, his wife, three of their children, and a handful of unlucky cousins visiting for the season were drowned along with hundreds of others. If only the Flaggs had heard that the Gray Man had been seen walking the beach of Pawley’s Island.

In the Georgetown Museum, this unnamed family is quoted as believing the Gray Man saved their lives and protected their home. If I were writing that story, I would include a ring on a ribbon, like that of poor ghostly Alice Flagg, washing up among the debris, in perfect and mysterious, some might say vindictive, condition. In the graveyard at All Saints Episcopal, in the Flagg plot, be sure to find the memorial to the rest of the family since we have already visited the flat marble stone marked only ALICE that most tourists are so eager to spot. On a dirt-and-moss-covered obelisk, a lengthy inscription has been carved in loving memory of “those lost in the storm on October 13th, 1893.” I have heard it told that Alice Flagg perished not from heartbreak or fever, but in the tidal wave that killed most of her family. As you and I know, such stories are flat wrong. She was looking for her ring decades before the storm of 1893.

In 2012, on the last day of summer, the season of disasters and catastrophes, my brother Jason called me first to say that Grandpa had a stroke and wasn’t expected to live until morning. I stayed awake all night waiting for the predawn flight. I imagined conversations with him in my empty apartment. I whispered aloud, “Please don’t go.” And then, “If you have to go on your own adventure now, don’t worry about me.” The power went out just as my lips closed. It came back after a minute or more, but my alarm clock blinked the time in red like the plat-eyes I would be so scared to see in the woods at night. Jason called to say he was gone. I could only say “One thirty-two” over and over again, until my brother, through his own tears, whispered, “How did you know?” Had he dispatched Harvey or played the trick himself? We will all be ghosts one day, if we are lucky.

The airport in Charlotte was the last place I saw Grandpa alive, which seems the way it was supposed to be after a friendship started with the spin of a globe. He dropped me off, as he always did, and I flew back to New York, where I stayed after graduate school. He always picked me up when I returned as well, waiting just beyond the designated line to lift me up in a hug and spin me around with the joy of reunion, as he had done in his driveway so many times. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer my last year at graduate school in New York, after smoking since his second-grade teacher offered him a cigarette, and, as I had in college, I was returning to Charlotte most weekends to spend time with him. Our shared faith in the power of education was not in vain, it turned out. I landed a prestigious internship with ease, and was lucky enough to get writing and editing jobs right out of school. I got a callback for a job at a glossy magazine as we said our goodbyes, final it would turn out. “I knew you could do it.” He picked me up off the curb and spun me around like I was five years old again, barefoot and beaming in his driveway.

I had not yet lost anyone important and did not know what to expect from grief. I did not expect, as I should have, to be helpless in the face of magical thinking, to find comfort in the logic of ghosts I had left in childhood. I heard his voice everywhere. It called to me at the oddest of times. I heard it first the day after he died. Mom was suddenly in charge of his business, Carolina Time, and had to account for the valuable