South of Broad (53 page)

“No, I couldn’t,” he says. “I’m on duty. You may not have heard. We had a storm last night.”

I explain that I am a close friend of Ike Jefferson and need to get a message to the chief. I tell him Niles needs help transporting some folks from his home up to some cabins in the mountains.

“Why should Chief give a shit?” Sergeant Townsend asks. “He’s up to his ass in alligators.”

“His parents and his kids are already up there,” I say. “Ike didn’t order you to arrest looters, did he?”

“Naw. The jail is packed. Said to beat the shit out of them instead.”

“That’s my guy,” I say. “Your name will be in the paper tomorrow, Sergeant.”

Ike sends a station wagon to Niles’s house and we load everyone in, except Molly and me. Niles does not like the thought of leaving Molly behind, and argues that she can’t do anything for anybody until the National Guard clears the debris and power is restored. He points out that the damage to the Rutledge home and her own home is so devastating that she can’t even begin to repair it without a construction team. But Molly remains adamant about staying, and she surprises me by saying, “Leo and I are going to find out what happened to my grandmother’s house on the beach.”

Niles says, “They’re not letting anyone onto Sullivan’s Island. The National Guard is keeping everyone off. The bridges are impassable.”

“I found a boat,” Molly says. “A bateau with a motor. It’s ready to go.”

“What will I tell Chad?” Fraser asks. “And your kids?”

“Tell them I’m in Brazil,” Molly answers drily.

When they finally leave, Molly and I walk to the remains of the marina. We stop by my mother’s house and find it wrecked and sad, the Poe home nearly collapsed. But Molly is set in her mission and has no time for reminiscence or emotion. Ike has found her a boat, and it is tied to a remnant of the devastated marina. Boats and yachts are strewn across Lockwood Boulevard in cruel studies of wreckage; the sleekness of a million-dollar yacht is turned to mockery as it lies smashed and disfigured on a Charleston roadway. But Molly is single-minded and unreachable as we inch our way through a slain nation of boats to get to a small bateau that survived Hugo in Ike’s neighbor’s garage. I start the engine and Molly points a finger out toward Sullivan’s Island. I tell her I know the way, and if I get my ass shot by a National Guardsman, our friendship is off. She does not laugh or say a single word as we cross Charleston Harbor and witness the devastation of the city as we pass by the great houses on the Battery. Because the boat is small and the tide is running high, it takes more than an hour to reach the southern edge of the island. Two shrimp boats are marooned in the middle of the salt marsh.

Then we begin passing beach houses, or what used to be beach houses.

“The poor Murphys, gone. The poor Ravenels, gone. Claire Smythe will be sick over this. But good for the Sanders and the Holts; they’re still standing. The poor St. Johns, and the poor Sinklers,” Molly murmurs. The litany of names continues as we make our way toward her grandmother’s beloved house. Weezie’s house. The summer house. Coming soon, coming soon.

“Where is it, Leo? Where’s Weezie’s house? Why would God take Weezie’s house? It’s gone. It’s all gone!” Molly bursts into tears as I turn the boat toward the gap-toothed space that Weezie’s house once occupied. I pull the boat up in the sand and secure it as Molly faces the negligible ruins of her childhood. She is on her knees in the sand, weeping, screaming, and out of control, not much giving a damn who witnesses or hears her grief. Only a pathetic remnant of the house is left, a half-wall beneath the house and a cement floor where we once played Ping-Pong and danced to the music of the Seeberg jukebox. The jukebox is gone and the Ping-Pong table demolished. There is a cheap Naugahyde couch that miraculously survived the deluge, but the water has moved it to the one remaining fragment of a far broken wall. There is a floor lamp, a dryer bag, and a forty-five record, the sole survivor of the missing Seeberg. I pick up the record and read the label: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” My God, I think, that song told Sheba’s story long before she got here. I hear a man’s voice yell, “Halt!”

Looking up, I see two painfully young National Guardsmen with their rifles locked and loaded and aimed at us. I drop the record on the cement floor and raise my hands in the air.

Molly rounds on them. “Get off my fucking property!” she screams. “You’ve got no right to be in Weezie’s house. Get out of my grandmother’s house and never come back. Unless I invite your asses, which I never will!”

She trips in the sand and sinks to her knees. One of the guardsmen shouts, “We’ve got our orders, ma’am. No one can come on the island. We’re trying to prevent looting.”

“Looting?” Molly shouts. “You think I’m here to loot? What would I fucking
loot?
Hey, there’s a Ping-Pong ball. Let me loot that. A beer can. Do I see an old license plate over there? Do you know what I really wanted, young man?”

“No, ma’am,” both guardsmen answer, lowering their rifles.

“The photograph albums. Pictures of my family coming here every summer. Five generations of us. Priceless photographs. Lost! Gone forever!”

“Gentlemen!” I call. “I’ll take care of the lady. I’ll get her off the island. Give us a few minutes.”

“That’ll be fine, sir,” one of the men says. Then they leave. Molly, the Charleston aristocrat, had intimidated the boys from the up-country. When I last look, they are running for their jeep.

It is lost on Molly, who has begun wailing again. I let her wail, because there are some emotions beyond comforting. The privilege of sharing such an intimate moment with Molly is not lost on me. We are standing on sacred ground, a monument from her childhood. Though the house can be rebuilt, it will take another fifty years for it to be sacred ground again. Molly stops weeping only when we both hear an unearthly breathing somewhere near us. We walk wearily to the waterlogged couch that is facing away from us, and find a six-foot porpoise lying on the cushions as if placed there by the hand of God. It is miraculously still alive, and without breaking stride, Molly orders me to find something that will enable us to carry the porpoise down to the sea.

I find a fragment of the splintered Ping-Pong table that looks large enough for the job. With extreme care, we load the porpoise onto the slab of wood. We labor and grunt and sweat as we bear the porpoise to the waves. We look like foot soldiers bringing a fallen comrade off a battlefield. The porpoise is heavy, deadweight, and Molly and I are still weak from the same ordeal that almost killed the porpoise. I fall to my knees, then rise in time for Molly to fall to hers. But we keep the porpoise steady, and move him toward the high tides the moon is bringing to Charleston.

As the sun is setting, we reach the water and walk out till we are waist-deep. Cradling the porpoise, we let the fragment of table go. We continue to walk the porpoise through the sun-shot harbor as Molly’s complexion turns to gold in the fresh, dazzled waters. For fifteen minutes, in our exhaustion and the peril of our brother mammal, we walk that damaged porpoise, going with the tide. We splash it with seawater and exhort it to live; finally demand it. We both need a sign that Hugo could not take everything from us, that a spirit lived in this land and in these waters that no hurricane could touch. Eventually, the porpoise’s breathing grows stronger, and it starts to move beneath our hands. Its skin becomes shiny. It looks like a gold slipper in the last light of the sun. When I think I can go no farther, when I believe I will drop into the ocean and die myself, the porpoise suddenly knocks me over with a kick from its powerful tail and leaves us forever, with Molly and me shouting, tears streaming down our faces. We fall apart at the seams again. But that is all right. Our friendship is a bright ring between us.

On Monday morning, I write about the trip to Sullivan’s Island and Molly’s terrible story of finding her grandmother’s house completely destroyed; but these stories are told a thousand times this awful season in Charleston. It is the porpoise that gets to my readers. By saving the porpoise, Molly has saved something in the soul of Charleston. I describe Molly Huger Rutledge’s beauty, and I confess that I have loved her since the day I first saw her. Though I didn’t intend it to be, the column is a love letter to Molly. In the final paragraph, I admit that I looked at her in a new way when that porpoise ignited to life and kicked away from us. This was a woman I had never known before. This Molly Rutledge had turned herself before my eyes into a sea nymph, a goddess of the storm.

CHAPTER 28
Seven Percent

O
n the Friday after Hugo, Molly and I drive to the North Carolina mountains to retrieve our storm-tossed families. Molly has succeeded in having three separate work crews begin the cleaning and repairing of the damage at the Rutledges’ mansion, her own house on East Bay Street, as well as Fraser and Niles’s house on Water Street where we had unwisely chosen to ride out the worst storm in the history of Charleston. I have managed to find a construction team from Orangeburg to start cleaning out the foot of black mud in the house where I grew up. I feel as though someone has put me through the rinse cycle of a washing machine for an entire week. Molly has spent the last seven days on her hands and knees cleaning the ubiquitous mud and scattered debris from her house; she and Chad owned some of the most valuable antiques in Charleston when the waters leaped the Battery wall. I discovered that Water Street had once been a creek bordered on both sides by salt marsh, and a favorite place for Charlestonians to fish and shrimp, in the early eighteenth century. Though the city filled it in and killed the marshes, the river preserved a memory of superb integrity and chose an ancient, dishonored path in its headlong charge into the city. You can bury all the streams and creeks you want to, but salt waterways remember where they came from.

Molly falls asleep as soon as we turn onto I-26, and does not awaken till I make the sharp, upward turn on the road that leads to the four shotgun houses where Starla and Niles were born. For years, I have heard that Niles was restoring these cabins of his childhood, but I was not prepared for the excellence of the carpentry and the shrewd attention to detail. He and Fraser have restored these ramshackle, unsafe shells into houses pretty enough to sit in the French countryside. On strong, fortified stilts, the four houses still hang over a pretty trout stream, and that clear water rushing over rocks becomes our white noise and our sleeping partner for the rest of the weekend. Chad has brought his and Molly’s two children, as well as Niles and Fraser’s kids, on his way from Highlands to Chicago. They rush out to greet Molly. The Jefferson kids pile out of their house. They all charge me at once and almost knock me down in their headlong joy and cries of “Uncle Leo!”

Mother walks out of the fourth cabin, and the sight of her moves something deep inside me. She looks like an old woman for the first time in her life. We embrace and hold each other and refuse to let each other go, and in that clinch of blood and family, we share a rare moment of connection as we listen to the stream rushing below us.

“My magnolia trees?” she asks.

“Standing tall,” I say.

“The house?”

“The first floor flooded. Ruined. Got a bunch of guys cleaning it up. You can live with Trevor and me till we get it cleaned up.”

“Your house?”

“A few scratches.”

She answers, “Then God does answer some prayers.”

“Very few in Charleston lately.”

Trevor is sitting on a screened porch playing a harmonica, of all things; but Trevor could play Rachmaninov tapping a butter knife on a drain spout. The harmonica seems congruent with these rough mountains and their swift, coursing streams, and he sounds like he’s been playing the instrument his whole life. He is playing “Barbara Allen” when I enter the house behind him and I wait until he finishes. I give him a glass of white wine and lean down to kiss his forehead.

“A little light making out before dinner?” I ask.

“You’ve always been such a tease,” he complains. “All talk and no semen.”

“Forgive me for unleashing that beast,” I say, looking back at Mother in the doorway.

“Beast? I find that a brazen come-on,” Trevor says.

“How do you know how to play a harmonica?” I ask. “I once heard you say a harmonica is to a piano as a sardine is to a sperm whale.”

“Oh, a sperm whale,” Trevor says. “By far, my favorite kind.”

“You and Mother getting along?”

“She’s been a peach, Leo. A living doll. Hugo changed her,” he says. Then, with a nod at the harmonica, “Let me explain the instrument to you, Leo. You control the sound by covering these holes with your tongue. I’m an artist with my tongue, if you really want to know.”

“I’m sorry I asked.”

“But wasn’t the answer fun?” he says. “I’ve always loved the suggestion of filth. The mere hint of the obscene with a small drop of malice has always been my favorite form of humor.”

“I smell charcoal burning,” I say. “Niles is ready to cook. Where’s Chad?”

“In Chicago, on business. You think he was going to babysit his kids for a whole weekend when there’s money to be made?” Then, abruptly, “I dream about Sheba every night, Leo.”

“I can’t talk about Sheba yet,” I warn him. “I’ll be able to soon, but not now. We haven’t had a chance to mourn her yet. But we’ve got the rest of our lives to do that. I may write a book about Sheba. About all of us. About this.”

“It won’t sell a copy if I’m not the main character,” Trevor says. We are laughing when we hear the dinner bell ring.

Our first meal in the mountains is celebratory, even sacramental. Niles cooks steaks for everyone and Fraser makes enough salad and baked potatoes and fresh vegetables to feed a changing of the guards. Coach Jefferson plays bartender and keeps the glasses filled all night. Mrs. Jefferson tries to coax any news we might have about Ike and Betty, but the only information I have received is that they are working around the clock and both have performed heroically during and after the assault of Hugo. Molly tells of her walks through the city and the sheer massiveness of the destruction. She has made the amazing discovery that a palmetto is more likely to survive a hurricane than a hundred-year-old oak tree. Her theory is that the palmetto tree has more natural flexibility and can bend all the way to the ground and still survive, but an oak knows only how to stand firm against the amazing blasts of wind, and makes itself susceptible to the perils of uprooting. She reports that the Citadel campus has lost more than fifty oak trees and she believes that there is not a single flower left blooming in the city. I say that the
News and Courier
has reported only thirty-two people killed in South Carolina, a number that seems incredibly low to me after what we endured on Water Street. Modern communication has enabled people on the coast to remove themselves from danger, and most citizens heeded those warnings. A few dumbos, like us, waited it out in our homes, and paid a stiff price for our hubris.

“Leo, I know you’re talking about me,” Worth Rutledge says. “I plead guilty as charged. I demanded that my wife stay and, of course, that meant that Niles and Fraser and Molly had to stay behind to care for us. If anyone had died, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

“We all made it, Worth,” Mother says, “and had that rarest of all things in life: we had an adventure.”

“I hope it’s my last,” Mrs. Rutledge says.

“We were happy to miss it,” Coach Jefferson says, and his wife laughs in agreement. “It’s like those football practices in August. Remember the two-a-days, Leo?”

“Never forget them.”

“Hell, looking back, I can’t believe what I put you kids through. But I also can’t believe I went through it myself.”

Mother says, “That football season led to a lot of things.”

“On your first day at Peninsula High,” I say, “could you ever imagine spending a night like this? The guests of Niles Whitehead and the Rutledge family of South Carolina?”

“That was a good team,” he says, ignoring my question. “Good leadership.”

“Especially the white cocaptain,” I say. “That kid was hell.” “Was my daddy on that team?” Little Ike pipes up to ask his grandfather.

“Your daddy and Uncle Niles were the stars of that team,” Coach Jefferson says. “And Uncle Chad surprised me more than any player I ever coached.”

“What about Uncle Leo?” one of the kids asks.

“He would get knocked over on every play,” the coach says. “But a lot of great linebackers would trip over his body as he was lying there on the ground.” He pauses at my noise of outrage, then admits, “Naw, son—truth is, Leo didn’t have much talent, but he got after it. By God, he would get after it.”

“Let’s talk about the cheerleading squad that season,” Trevor inserts with a spark of his old passion. “Talk about groundbreakers: I was the first male cheerleader at Peninsula, and had the best legs on that team, by far.”

“I beg your pardon,” Molly says.

Our group moves inside as the chill night air takes control of the mountain. Niles lights an oak fire with fluid, expert movements, the glow of the fire sweet to the flesh. The house is packed as tightly as a bus, the kids littering the floor, or sitting in the laps of the seated adults. Little Ike sits on one of my knees and little Niles on the other. I know I will sleep deeply that night.

I am beginning to get drowsy with the fire when Molly and Chad’s delectable fourteen-year-old, Sarah, speaks up. “Mama, we want to hear about the porpoise.”

“How’d you know about the porpoise?” Molly asks.

“Daddy called and read it to us,” her son, Worth junior, answers. “From up in Chicago,” he adds, with a childlike wonder.

Molly looks perplexed, and I explain, “It went out on the wire.”

“Leo referred to you as a sea goddess, my dear,” Mrs. Rutledge tells her in her earnest formality, with a small note of fondness toward me, unheard-of before the storm.

“Leo was overwriting as usual,” Molly says, though her eyes are shining with pleasure.

I disagree. “I was underwriting,” I assure her.

The children insist on hearing the story from her own lips, and I sit there by the fire and listen as Molly’s clear, drawling voice takes us back to the roofless, storm-damaged city we left behind. Her account is straightforward and accurate, but when she comes to the part about the porpoise, the story pulls up lame.

She hurries to finish, her voice drifting toward ennui, even disinterest. She ends with the flattest note imaginable, saying, “We carried the porpoise to the water and let it go.”

There is a beat of silence when she is done, then young Sarah offers with the brashness of extreme youth, “It sounded better when Uncle Leo told it.”

“Molly lacks my son’s ability to exaggerate,” Mother says in Molly’s defense.

“What she lacks,” I correct, “is truthfulness.” I ask the children, “Have any of your parents’ dull, witless, and boring friends ever told you any stories? No, of course not. The only man in this room who ever told you fabulous, wonderful stories is your old uncle Toad—the greatest guy of all time. Right?”

“Right!” they agree. But then instantly begin amending themselves—“Except for my daddy.”

The bright, happy children of my friends have offered a secret source of pleasure for me over the years. My childlessness is an inner wound and a point of unrelenting tension between Mother and me, so I turned this lovely troop of children into willing substitutes. I made up bedtime stories for them that I refined over the years. I wanted to dazzle their imaginations, and I never told a story in which they themselves did not have leading roles; I cast them as kings and queens and Knights of the Round Table, as Green Berets and French Foreign Legionnaires. Together, we route the nighttime terrors by fighting beasts and giants and bad-tempered dragons. The children and I take on crooks and scoundrels and highwaymen and any bullies they encounter on the school yard, or any teacher who brings misery instead of learning into their lives. Though we always fight fair, our enemies always die. That is one of my rules of storytelling: the bad guy always has to get it, and his death is slow and hard. When they go to sleep, the evil lost in a frontier of night lies vanquished and still in the dust as I say, “The end,” and kiss them good night.

“Let me tell the real story of finding the porpoise,” I say. “It’ll be your bedtime story for the night.”

“I’m too old for a bedtime story,” Sarah says.

“You’re never too old for a bedtime story,” I tell her. “The story’s too important for that. Your father read my column in a Chicago newspaper,” I say as example, “and the reason it made it so far was that the story was good.”

“I’d accept that in a court of law,” Worth says.

Fraser asks, “How many people in this room think Uncle Leo will exaggerate this story?”

The entire room full of doubters and scoundrels and humorless literalists raises its hands in the air, and the children’s laughter skitters through the room like hurled marbles.

I say, “Betrayed by my own mother, the parents of my best friends, the children of my best friends, and then my best friends themselves. It’s a low point in my life. Does anything I tell you sound true?”

“No,” the children squeal in unison.

“Twenty-seven percent is true,” young Sarah offers from her place next to her mother. “Some of it’s true. Then you start adding things.”

“Nineteen percent,” Little Ike offers to the floor. “Uncle Leo’s had me killing dragons since I was born, and I’ve never even seen one.”

Amid the squeaking of the kids, I am moved by Little Ike. “When the lights went out and you were a little kid, alone in the bed, did you ever feel that there were things loose in your bedroom?”

“Yes, I still do,” says Niles junior.

“But after I told a story, what happened to all those awful things that made kids afraid to go to sleep?”

“Dead,” the kids say.

“Twenty-seven percent dead?” I ask. “Nineteen percent?”

“A hundred percent,” the older kids say.

“Let me tell the story of Molly and the porpoise. Listen carefully, kids, so you can tell me where I made up things. Then you’ve got to be able to tell me what is real, what I didn’t invent,” I say. “Kids, I’m teaching you to tell a story. It’s the most important lesson you’ll ever learn.”

Standing in front of the fire, I speak a single word, “Riverrun,” the first word of James Joyce’s novel
Finnegans Wake
. I wink at Mother, who greets my joke with a scowl.

As the river runs beneath us, I dive deeply into the sweet-water fathoms of story itself. “When news of the death of the great actress Sheba Poe flashed around the world, the first person to weep was God. He had taken great care in the shaping of that exquisite woman and thought that Sheba was one of His most flawless creations. As He wept one of His tears fell into the Atlantic, near Africa, and a wind began to move. It was an angry wind and it asked God what it wanted, and God said, ‘Gird yourself for battle, wind. Grow strong and fearful. I will hollow out an eye for you in the center of your brute majesty. Go to Charleston. They let my Sheba be killed there. I name thee Hugo.’