A Southern Girl (27 page)

The Seoul Olympics gave us all a chance to see Korea, a land that struck me as vividly colorful, exotic, and intriguing. News coverage included reports of a temporary halt to international adoptions due to potential embarrassment, a loss of face, for the Korean people and their government since both were sensitive to the notion that orphaned children had become a leading export. Allie showed little interest, opting to do her homework during the evening broadcasts and asking me to let her know when the equestrian competition came on.

The year 1989 brought the great hurricane. Like many in the city, we made the initial decision to ride it out at home. Sarah joined us as the barrier islands, vulnerable to even modest storms, evacuated. By the time the storm’s ferocity was appreciated, it was too late to leave the peninsula. Highways clogged. A neighbor who panicked at noon returned in the late afternoon, reporting a three hour wait on a single bridge, during which his car moved twenty feet. Allie, age ten, voiced her intent to stand on the sea wall to watch the whitecaps in the harbor. She had never experienced a hurricane, nor did she appreciate how winds that had two weeks before swirled off the African coast could be brought to such a pitched force and concentration as now approached Charleston. After Hugo, the mere word, “hurricane,” knotted her stomach. As the storm bore down, Josh laughed and talked on the phone with teenage indifference to danger, while Steven watched the news and repeated to us every precaution broadcast. They should store some water in the tub, he suggested. Fresh batteries for the
flashlights would be prudent. A transistor radio. Pets should be brought inside, though we had none.

Tornadoes plague Kansas, but not hurricanes, so I also had never witnessed a real one. By dusk, when the winds strengthened, I went to our room and stood at a window with the lights off. I studied the mammoth live oaks that bordered our property. They must be two hundred years old. Silhouetted by the fading light in the harbor, they spread stately arms over the yard and roof as if to guard the house and us from wind, from sea, from rain, from shelling by the Yankees, from all threats from any source. I found comfort in their presence. Like avuncular sentries they stood stolidly, too massive and too old to move or even to bend more than a few inches. From their muscled limbs hung Spanish moss, and it was the winds stirring this moss that first parted for me the atmospheric curtain hanging over the harbor, to reveal the power of the storm gathering behind it. Gently at first, but with ever increasing whips and lashes, moss blew toward me, the trees themselves hardly moving. But the storm was still a hundred miles offshore.

I joined the family, gathered in front of a television. Coleman and I did our best to conceal nervousness, feeling the weight of our decision to ride it out at home and deriving no comfort from the presence of neighbors, equally regretting their decisions. “It will all blow over,” Coleman said breezily. Josh insisted that Bennie McNamara’s father had predicted five thousand deaths in the city just before the McNamaras pulled out for Greenville the day before. Steven looked at us for a more optimistic assessment. “Oh, bullshit,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. We ate dinner on trays, watching news reports track the storm. For a time, an impetuous northward veer promised to spare the city at the expense of points closer to Myrtle Beach. Just as suddenly, a westward turn fixed the city in the storm’s cross-hairs.

I returned to our room. A window inches from my face began to vibrate. Rain pelted the window in sheets. An eerie moan rose and fell from outside. I could not locate its source, as if gusts of wind were being driven by a giant, unseen engine that whirled and whined in a growing mechanized frenzy. Darkness fell. In the house, all was quiet. Behind me, every security I had come to know, to rely upon, remained in place, calmly waiting. But outside, in the artificial light from the street, I saw the oaks
begin to grow animated. Between torrents of rain, limbs begin to sway. Spanish moss clung stubbornly to branches that had been as much a home to it as this house was to us, but the wind howled louder, the branches bent, and the moss extended parallel to the ground before losing its grip and flying wildly into the night. The storm’s mounting fury took on a tribal arrhythmia. In my imagination, the street lights became fires on an aboriginal plain, with the oaks bending and swaying as I had never seen them do, warriors building up their wills to face some cataclysmic force just now making its way over Charleston’s horizon. My trance was interrupted by Allie, who stood in the doorway to ask me to call the stables to check on Libbie, her favorite pony, but by then lines were down. I went back to the window, willing myself to watch until the power went out in the city. When it did, I groped to the stairs, guided downward by the faint glow from an array of candles Coleman lit. We sat in the living room, listening to wind howl at an impossible pitch as a seventeen foot storm surge washed over Ft. Sumter.

In a five hour span, Hugo affected Charleston as the years of Civil War had affected it. The city was not the same on the morning of September 22, yet instead of redefining it the storm added a bold brush stroke to a patina of timelessness, much as the war had done. True, in the dawn hours, that brush stroke resembled one that Jackson Pollock might have inflicted—ancient trees uprooted, homes flooded, power lines strewn in psychotic confusion, roofs transported to neighboring municipalities, chimneys reduced to rubble, boats suddenly and violently drydocked in parking lots. While the loss of life never approached our neighbor’s rumored forecast, the storm did kill. Yet the defining landmarks remained. The steeple-graced skyline stood mussed but enduring. Historic homes along the Battery and throughout the city, rather than succumbing to condemnation, renewed themselves on a tide of insurance that flowed through after Hugo’s waters receded. In the weeks that followed, roofing nails became the gold standard to which the local currency was pegged.

If I had a philosopher’s bone in my body, I would find a way to cast my time in front of the window, watching Hugo approach, as prescience, a harbinger of the news I got months later from my oncologist. I’d been feeling weak and sluggish for weeks, thinking I was perhaps anemic. When doubling up on vitamins and iron didn’t help, I blamed my thyroid. My stomach began to ache, and bouts of diarrhea became more frequent.
Coleman asked if I was losing weight, and from the fit of certain outfits I knew I had. But the last thing I suspected, the. very. last. thing, was pancreatic cancer, and it was only following the tests and Dr. Jameson’s insistence that both Coleman and I come to his office that I knew something was very wrong. I left that office with a death sentence. Coleman knew it. I knew it. He put his arm around me and we walked to the parking lot in a daze. “Wait,” I said, as if remembering I’d left something in the oven, “I’m only thirty-eight. I have children to raise …”

But the disease did not wait. It progressed rapidly, an angry, aggressive invader that intended to kill me, and the sooner the better. For the next two years, chemotherapy and radiation made me really sick, to the only point in my life when I considered suicide. I honestly think I would have done it had not the prognosis, “perhaps six months,” been so imminent. Toward the end, attended by some wonderful hospice people who deserve laurels in the hereafter, I stayed at home, took morphine as sparingly as possible, and, as they say, put my affairs in order.

As any mother would, I worried most about the children. Although quite nauseous, I attended Josh’s high school graduation and helped outfit his room at the University of South Carolina, where he is now a sophomore, essentially a grown man, which comforts me some. Steven, a senior in high school, still relies on me for advice with girls, and he distresses me because he refuses to believe all this is happening. I can’t believe it either. If I make it that long, I’ll be at his high school graduation if I have to watch it from a gurney.

And then there is Allie. I know to feel guilt is insane, but I do, because I will be the second mother to abandon her. She spends hours in bed with me, holding me and hugging me and asking if she can do anything. No, dear, no one can do anything, Goddamnit.

Coleman leaves for work late and comes home for long lunches, which he usually eats at my bedside. In the evening we watch the news together, although more often than not I drift off before the first commercial. World news doesn’t engage me much now, for obvious reasons. The news in my world revolves around graduations and weddings and grandchildren, and I won’t be here for any of it.

Toward the very end—I sensed it coming—I gave him a letter I’d written to Allie, with explicit instructions to deliver it on an exceptional occasion; admission to college, engagement, wedding—the choice will of
necessity be his. But special, I insisted. He took the letter with tears in his eyes, and we had a good cry over what was and might have been. He kept telling me he can’t do it without me, but I know he can. I’ve always known him better than he knows himself. And now I am tired and need to rest.

Part 3

FLOW

Yet e’en as I rowed I felt the great tide

Relax in its mighty endeavor

’Tis the fate of a restless heart to subside

And to end is the fate of a river.

ROBERT WOODWARD BARNWELL, SR.

“River and Tides,”
Realities and Imaginations

17

Coleman

Power failure. I grope for the desk drawer, open it, and pan for a flashlight front to back but find nothing closer than the hammer I used last week to mount a picture. The room is in total darkness and, once I settle back in my chair, palling silence as well. It will not last, I think with a grin. I’ll give her thirty seconds.

Allie is studying in her room on the floor below. She retains her Hugoinduced fear of the dark. We joke about it, but only in daylight. Her chair scrapes against the hardwood below and my grin expands a fraction.

“Dad?” she calls out from the landing on her floor.

“Up here, sweetheart! In my study.”

“What do you think caused it?” she asks as her voice draws nearer. “Beats me. A transformer must have blown. I’ll get a candle.”

“I’ll go with you,” she says, a bit too quickly.

We feel our way to the banister and edge downward. At the middle landing off her room our hands overlap on the newel post and we each give a faint start. In the main hall the grandfather clock, a wise old mahogany monarch never a vassal to electricity, ticks reliably and louder as we arrive on the first floor. The windows, virtually floor to ceiling in the dining room we are passing, emit no light. All of Charleston seems entombed, and the moon is new or smothered. We reach the kitchen.

“They’re not here,” I report, rummaging in the logical places. “I must have used the last match trying to get the grill started.”

“Here’s a candle,” she says from the direction of the pantry.

I shake my head to signal the futility of a candle without a match when I realize the futility of the gesture.

“The camping gear,” I say. “The lamp is stored by the tent and the waterproof matches are in the backpacks.”

“But that’s in the basement.”

“So get them. I’ll wait.”

“Dad …”

“Come on, let’s go.”

Access to the basement is through a door off the laundry room. Its stubborn knob has irritated me for years, but not enough to fix. This basement is one of the few in old Charleston and something of an engineering marvel in that it stays dry, hurricanes excepted. The stairs creak and the ceiling makes a tall man pay for walking erect but then that is the way basements should be. I like the place, spiders and all.

Only I like it lit, and tonight it is an ink spot in a lead-lined coffin. The knob yields, I probe blindly for the first step, and cool, captive air tinged with mildew rises to meet me.

“Hold on to me,” I instruct over my shoulder. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

“No,” she says softly. “I’ll wait here.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” and she sounds it.

So I descend alone. On another night, I would have covered these nine steps in less time than it will take Allie to seat herself, whistling as I went. But now I pause. Is something down there? I listen. She breathes behind me—nothing more. Inwardly, I laugh at my foolishness and feel a flush come to my face, but my grip on the banister seems to be guarding against something more than a fall. “Wimp,” I mutter silently. Forty-six is long past the age for ghosts. I take two more steps.