Carolina Moon (2 page)

I mean didn’t I go straight home to my own husband and pull him under the mistletoe? I pulled him around his whole life. I pulled him by his manhood and by the heart, and he loved me every day of his life. He knew about you and loved me just the same. Then you were gone and now he’s gone. And it’s
your
hands I keep thinking of now. I think of your blunt square nails, nicotine stained and warm, rough on the sides of your thumbs from your habit of weeding out the grass from between the bricks of your old rented walkway. How many nights did you squat there and pull and pull, obsessed with getting every new little sprig that had taken root in the night while we whispered and kissed, risking hurt and humiliation. The hands.

What a small part of the body and yet a whole life is there, every trace of the fingertip, skin and cells. I remember the time you sunburnt your back on an overcast day, the blues were running too good to stop you said, it didn’t feel hot, it was barely May. Ten days later you lay face down while I loosened the dead skin and pulled it off in strips. I held a piece up to the light and I could see the marks and texture, like dried glue or gummy paste. You said, “Peel me, it feels good” and I continued the whole afternoon while you dozed under my touch. I peeled you like a plum, a grape, your skin glazed in salt. I would love to feel your hands right now, cupping my face, pulling me to you. Sometimes I wish you had burned to ash, that you were somehow scattered to the wind, rather than confined there in your dark satin box, empty sockets and protruding jaw, hip blades protecting and housing absolutely nothing. You are nothing in my life, and everything.

All these years have passed and I am still haunted, still longing. I see you now in a younger form, a thinner, sweeter form. You appear at my door, your toolbox in hand, and I lead you in, watch your back as you walk away. Through this image, this apparition of what might have been you, I have found some bit of forgiveness. Could it be I’m getting soft in
these later years? Remember that joke about when you get old everything that’s supposed to be soft gets hard and what’s supposed to be hard gets soft?? Well, maybe that applies to my heart. Maybe what I can do is help others find love and peace and security.

These things are not easy to come by, but that’s old news and I don’t feel like dealing in old news today. I’m feeling tired, you know? I’m real goddamned tired. I’m so tired that every now and then I start thinking that I
understand
what you did and then I really get mad because I’ve never been weak a day in my life and you, my love, were nothing but. I truly wish I could hate you for it.

Wallace pours another cup of coffee and looks at himself in the chipped brown mirror over the small lavatory. A lifetime has just about come and gone. How easy it is to respond to bells and rings and calls and cries. How easy it was for this poor woman to devote a whole life to a dream, to spend all of her time looking to what life was or is going to be. The best part of going fishing is the getting ready; buy your cut bait or bloodworms, get some beer and a bag of ice, cooler, snacks, sandchair, then spread it all out, set it all up like a little world, like that woman did as a child up under her house. Wallace Johnson would much rather read about a place far off from home than go there. He has always known that if he went, it wouldn’t live up to what he’d thought. He has been this way his whole life, and now with retirement in view, he’s starting to feel good about the way life has gone. There’s a need for the anchors and the cogs, a need for those who stay in place and mind the shop. How else is there such a thing as history? How else can a child come home if he should need to?

Tom Lowe parks his truck off to the side where the asphalt road buckles and disappears in a slope of slick sandbags and warning signs. The old cottages on this stretch of the beach are condemned, their doors and windows boarded up, porch wood rotten and sagging. When the tide comes in, the waves will lap the steps of the last house, leaving a ring of brown foam; the water will rise up to what’s left of the road like one of those mirages you think you could drive on through.

Tom unlaces his workboots and tosses them onto the seat of the truck, slaps his leg, and calls to the old black-and-white collie riding shotgun. It is still low tide, and once they maneuver their way over broken concrete and splintered boards, they are on the strand and walking out to where there used to be still more houses. The sand is hot and squeaks with every step. The only other person in sight is a fisherman way down at the point.

Even though Tom’s hometown is only fifteen miles inland, there are children there who have never seen the ocean. They don’t know the origin of the sharp briny odor they accept as home, have never heard the constant rushing of the surf. Their summers are spent in
the flat, sandy blueberry patches and dusty tobacco fields of the area. Many of their families have no cars.

Tommy Lowe had led such a childhood. His father loved the ocean, and his mother rejected everything of importance to his father. If his father had spent all their money on air, talked only of air, then his mother would have bound their heads in plastic dry-cleaning bags.

But Cecil Lowe’s passion had been the ocean—his ultimate dream an oceanfront lot, where high-tide waves would slap and spray creosote-pitched pilings. He bought such a house in 1953, and Tommy’s mother never forgave him. She was pregnant and wanted a house in town. At the time he had sold one short story to the
Saturday Evening Post
, and he believed that first publication foretold a career of literary honors and money pouring in. The Lowes divorced a year later, not long after Hurricane Hazel hit the Carolina coast with a roar and persistent force that left his father’s dream property submerged. Ten points for the ocean, zero for Cecil, he was heard to have said out at the Waffle King Diner, the one spot in the dry county where there was liquor for the regulars. I surrendered when I saw the front porch cave in, he laughed, his eyes already glassy. For years he regaled folks around town with his tales of observing the hurricane, how, minutes before Hazel struck in full force, he fled to a friend’s house on the inland waterway, how they proceeded to drink through the storm, how fortunate they had remained in one of two rooms left standing.

Tommy himself saw the ocean for the first time when he was six. A couple in town, Mr. and Mrs. Lonnie Purdy, loaded up the whole first-grade class in a big yellow school bus and took them on a field trip. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the Purdys had chosen to park the bus on the very piece of property that belonged to Tommy. They and the children had stood at the back of his lot at low tide, the very spot where thirty years later he dreams of a hot tub and permanent
keg. That is, if the ocean ever coughs up what rightfully belongs to him, this pitiful birthright, submerged land and a stack of yellowed copies of the
Saturday Evening Post
, all with the same date, all with the same words in the table of contents: “ ‘A Dream of Lost Lovers,’ by Cecil Lowe,” a rather hot title to be found under the Norman Rockwell cover painting of a happily freckled, peachy-keen family, like Tommy Lowe never knew.

But at six, he’d known nothing of his property. All he knew was he was thrilled to be there, thrilled to be in the presence of the Purdys, a couple so weird that children automatically assumed they were rich—Mr. Purdy drove an old Cadillac and wore driving gloves, and Mrs. Purdy wore long flowing dresses and a snake bracelet on her plump upper arm.

What Mrs. Purdy told each new first-grade class was that she had grown up in Fulton and not seen the ocean until she was in high school. She told the children that the first time she ever saw the ocean, the first time she ever smelled the salt air, she felt she had seen the whole creation; she said she couldn’t put it into words, not then and not now, but the sight of the water, the swells and spray, gave her life “perspective.” Tommy remembers her saying that word,
perspective
, her shiny pink lips sounding it slowly, her painted-on eyebrows going up in a way that said,
Do you get what I’m saying?
She told the children that she had something to give back, a debt to pay, which is how she got the principal to hand over the school bus keys every September. The first-graders had never seen a grown-up who wore such strange-looking clothes. They had never known an adult who listened to them so hard, eyes wide and never blinking as she twisted her long dark hair around and around her hand. She had hair longer than any of the girls in the class, and it was exciting to be with her, to stand close enough to catch a whiff of her perfume. Even after Mr. Purdy
died, she made this yearly pilgrimage so every first-grader in the town of Fulton, regardless of the last name or street address or money available, spent at least one September afternoon rolling in the sand and wading in the surf. Come that perfect fall day (and she invariably picked a good one), the children would all be there, lined up in front of the school waiting for a seat on Mrs. (now she uses Ms.) Purdy’s bus.

THESE DAYS, TOMMY
does a lot of work for Ms. Purdy (she has recently changed the pronunciation to Pur DAY). She dresses the same way exactly and her hair, though gray, is still yanked back in a bushy ponytail that reaches the middle of her back. Tommy does carpentry and brick work, furniture refinishing and repair. He recently finished building a huge deck to surround the hot tub he installed for her new business (a quit-smoking clinic), and now he’s building a closet in the small apartment she has over her garage. He once tried to tell Mrs. Purdy (she insists he call her Quee, though it doesn’t come off his tongue easily) what an impact she made on him with that trip, but she wouldn’t allow it. He was hoping to work his way up to thanking her for the other time she had helped him as well, that time when he was in high school with nowhere else to turn.

Now he kneels in the firm, damp sand that belongs to him. He pays forty-one cents a year in county taxes and eleven cents to the city. Every day he takes a break from his work and comes here, sometimes just to sit, sometimes to wade in and pace off the lot, seventy feet deep and fifty feet wide. He sits back, jeans and sneakers wet and sandy, and scoops his hands into the sand. One of the few times he actually talked to his father, they were here, at the beach. Tom was ten and interested in the stories his father had to tell about the pirates who once inhabited these very waters. Cecil told him that their
name, Lowe, was derived from George Lowther’s, a pirate from England who killed himself. “It makes sense that he would,” Tom’s father had said that day, the hem of his khakis damp, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up to just below the elbow. Then they drove back into town where his father took him to the new bank building to ride the elevator up to the third floor. It was the highest building in town.

Tom tried that day to absorb all he could about his father. It had been six years since he had seen him and might be another six before he saw him again. He realized he had his father’s coloring, the straight, almost black hair and hazel eyes; he had the sharp facial bones and full lips. But his father was a lanky six feet and two inches, and Tommy was one of the shorter boys in his class.

In the car, his father talked about Atlantis, how maybe somewhere out in the depths of the ocean there existed a whole world that had been swallowed, bottled. Tommy had tried to imagine it, his own town submerged, wavy and dark in the deepest depths. He imagined their house, a small brick ranch washed through: windows black, drapes undulating like sea anemones, sparse furniture held in place by the weight of the water. Cecil talked about how easily the world could come to an end—it could happen in numerous ways, to the world at large or to the world of an individual. “For instance, the world your mother and I created,” he said and paused, the car idling at the intersection. “It ended.” He stared straight ahead, jaw clenched, and in that moment Tommy understood why his mother hadn’t wanted to let him go on this outing. This was what she was scared about. This is what she must have meant all of those times she told Tommy that his father was a dark-hearted man. “It was sad that it ended,” he continued. “I love your mother. That wasn’t what it was all about.” Tommy wanted to ask then—as he has many many times
since—what
was
it all about, then? Was it him? Had his being born ruined that world, because his father had certainly never said anything to take that burden away from him.

His mother, on the other hand, told him many things, maybe too many things. She told him how she waited to hear from his father during Hazel, how Tommy was just an infant but Cecil had thought nothing of heading down to the beach with his buddies. He sat there, shit-faced (Tommy’s mother had used the word
inebriated
), and watched the storm, which he later described to Tommy’s mother with such clarity—the slate gray of the sky darkening still, while ferocious winds swept porches and piers into the sea like so many matchsticks. The rush of the blinding rain and the crazy kick of adrenaline as he braced himself for death.

Tom’s mother had told him that when his father returned home two days later, it was like she was seeing a ghost. He hadn’t shaved, and he stood all hunch-shouldered out on the stoop where the rain still dripped from the aluminum awning that had fallen to one side. She told Tommy that she greeted him with a shush and pointed to the corner of the room where Tommy was sleeping in the playpen. Cecil went straight to the corner and knelt there, addressed his child as if he were an adult, informed him that it was a great shame but due to forces of nature beyond his control he had just lost Tommy’s inheritance, a lovely piece of oceanfront property that should have been worth thousands. Whenever Tommy’s mother told that story, he tried to imagine his father out on the stoop, looking like a ghost. He wanted to believe that his father was like Gray Man, the famous apparition who arrives as a warning, a safety sign to those lucky enough to glimpse his shadowed form. It was in a book Tommy had read at school along with other ghost stories like “The Maco Light,” in which a headless man wanders the train tracks in search of his
head, and the one where a Confederate general appears at dusk on the very spot he died at Fort Fisher.