Sullivans Island-Lowcountry 1 (6 page)

first time some bubble wit lifts her Wonder Bra in his direction.

Who needs it?”

“You’re ready. I’ll get you a list of lawyers and you can start

interviewing them next week.”

“Okay.” I inhaled the healing salt of the beach and exhaled

my soured marriage.“I just hate dealing with this, you know?”

“I know, I don’t blame you for that at all.” Maggie reached

over, patted my arm and continued.“Look, a family breakup is a

tragedy, no doubt about it, but you don’t have cancer, you’ve got

a great job and you have Beth.What’s he got? Some stupid twit!

Big deal! Sounds to me like he’s the loser, not you.”

“I hope he rots in hell.”

“That’s the spirit!” Maggie started cleaning up. She took our

glasses and put them on the tray and, balancing it, wiped the

tabletop with a napkin.“You need a new haircut.”

Having someone who always told me what I needed was

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

a little exasperating, but I knew it didn’t pay to call her on it.

“You’re right, I need to do something about my looks. But

that tightwad I need to serve with papers still has the five bucks

his Aunt Helen gave him for his tenth birthday! I need another

job or something.”

“Or a bulldog lawyer, somebody with zero sense of humor.”

“Yeah, with big teeth who’s got the guts to tear a big piece

out of his miserable carcass. Wait! Don’t take the celery! You

want a hand with that? Where are our children? It’s getting late.”

“You just relax, I can handle this. I guess they’ll be home

soon. Listen, if they caught anything, why don’t you stay for

supper? Crab cocktails and grilled steaks? Not the worst meal

on earth.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Hey, Maggie?” I stared at her while I

dug around for the right words.“I’m gonna get a lawyer. I just have

to find the right person and I have to find my nerve, you know?”

“Since when have you had a problem finding nerve?”

“Very funny. What I mean to say is that I really appreciate

your advice.”

She smiled at me. “Well, you know your own mind. You

always have. I just don’t want to see you victimized again.”

“I was never victimized. I just married the biggest ass in

South Carolina and was too bullheaded to see it.”

“Well put by the family poet!” Maggie smiled at me again.

“I just want you to be yourself again, you know? Like a bad dog,

chasing cars. I miss that about you. I mean, what would you do

if you could do anything with your life? Like, change careers?”

She balanced the tray on her hip, held the screen door open

and challenged me to come clean.

“I don’t know. Maybe . . . oh, shoot, Maggie, I don’t know.”

“Well, think about it, little sister. There’s a new world out

there if you want it. Seize the day and all that. Livvie didn’t raise

us to wallow.”

“You’re right. Hey, you know, on the growing list of things I

intend to do with my life is another tidbit.”

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

29

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“I’m gonna figure out what happened to Daddy.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at me like I

had said something foul. “Give it up, Susan,” she said. “Daddy’s

been dead for decades.”

“That’s not it, Maggie,” I said. “I just have to know that I

didn’t cause it.”

“Susan. I’m your sister. I love you. . . .”

“I know that. . . .”

“You need to concentrate on other things. Daddy died of a

heart attack. Period.”

I hated when she looked at me like that, taking the posture

that her word was the final one on the subject. So I said,“It ain’t

period. It’s a question I have to resolve for my own soul.”

“Suit yourself. But I think your time’s better spent on other

avenues,” she said.

“Whatever. But, I’m telling you I know in my guts that

Daddy was murdered,” I said.

“Susan, ain’t nobody on this planet who loves you more

than me but I’m telling you I can’t stand to listen to this.”

“Maggie,” I said, “I can’t stand to
think
it. I have to know

that the fight didn’t cause him to die. I have to believe it was the

Klan.”

“What is this fight you always refer to? I don’t know
what

you’re talking about!”

She was becoming agitated. It was suddenly clear that for

some reason she didn’t remember the fight. Maybe she had

blocked it from her mind. I didn’t know. I just wanted the

waters smooth again.

“Never mind,” I said,“I’ll figure it out someday.”

“Well, my advice is worry about the living. The dead had

their chance.”

“Whoa, that’s cold,” I said.

“No, it’s not. I care about you and Beth.That’s all.”

She went inside.The door slammed behind her with a loud

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

thwack
and the sound of wood slapping wood woke me up like a

sock in the jaw. Maggie had just succinctly reduced my life to an

ancient Latin maxim and some hard facts. She was right about

Livvie too. Livvie would be incensed to have seen me rolling

around in my despair of chocolate chip cookies and fast food for

the past three months.

Maggie was always right.When all hell broke loose, Maggie

was right there at my side. She’d taken Beth under her wing too.

She had listened to me wail and moan ad nauseam. It was

enough now. I looked defeated and that had never been a word

in my vocabulary.

It’s just that my head was in gridlock at the thought of a

new life. I was a little afraid, you know? What if I failed? What if

I couldn’t take care of Beth? What if she went wild and flunked

out of school and got pregnant? What if this was all there was?

O Lord, I prayed, help me figure this out!

I peeled myself up from the rocker, knowing the slats had

left their imprint on the back of my legs. I decided to throw one

leg over the banister and straddled it like a horse, hanging on to

a support beam, the same way I did when I was a child.The tide

was almost high and its power was mesmerizing. I wished I

could have some of it for myself.

The waves had now grown from the baby hiccups they

were at low tide to crashing rollers, and washed everything in

their path with silvery foam. They began down at the eastern

end of the Island at Breach Inlet. Danger, danger. People

drowned in whirlpools and ebb tides there every year in spite of

posted warnings. Didn’t people read?

I knew that attempting to investigate Daddy’s death was dan-

gerous too, but the compulsion to do so was growing each day. Of

all the stones I carried in the sack tied to my heart, his death was

the heaviest. I had told Maggie it was a personal guilt thing, but

the guilt stemmed from being the only one who seemed to care

if he had died at all, never mind
how.
Added to that was Tom’s

deception, which only exacerbated my thirst for truth.

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

31

The waves arrived in stacked sets of three, the current driv-

ing them in on an angle. As they reached our end of the Island,

they seemed to calm in the faint, sweeping beams of the light-

house.Turning tides were hypnotic.The water flooded the shore

in anger, then turned, withdrew and renewed itself.

The beams from the lighthouse grew in intensity, spreading

protection for boats at sea. It was in these moments that I was

sure there was a God. He was tapping me on my stubborn

shoulder, telling me the scene before me was a metaphor for my

own life. Withdraw and renew; life goes on. Maybe Beth and

I would stay for dinner, crack some crabs, grill steaks and shoot

the breeze. Maggie was right. I needed to reinvent myself. The

question was, could this old dog still hunt?

I could just see Beth and Maggie’s boys now, coming down

the beach in silhouette against the edge of dusk. They were

swinging a basket of crabs and a bucket of bait. It could have

been a photograph of our childhood, the happy days. So many

days I spent with Maggie,Timmy and Henry, catching fish and

crabs, throwing plough mud at each other . . . those were, I

think, my happiest memories. We’d come home all sunburned

and sticky and present Momma and Livvie with our catch of

the day. They’d act like we were heroes for feeding the family.

We were so proud.

And then there was our daddy, Big Hank.

Two

The Outhouse

}

Summer, 1963

ON’T, Daddy! Please! I’m sorry! Please stop!”

It was the unmistakable lament of my little brother

DHenry begging for mercy while he got a rare whip-

ping from the old man. Henry was seldom spanked. I thought

he must’ve blown up the church or something, because Henry

was Daddy’s undisputed favorite.

When Daddy took off his belt, we paid for it with the sting-

ing disappearance of a layer of our childhood innocence. The

old man had an uncontrollable temper. It simply didn’t pay to

draw a line in the sand with him. If you argued with him, his

rage grew to such outlandish proportions that you might walk

away in the right, but your backside would be covered with

welts. He would never understand that these beatings changed

the way we felt about him. The cracking of leather across our

young skin sliced away layers of trust, and our love.

Timmy and I were on the porch, holding our breath, not

moving a hair. A door slammed somewhere inside.
What now?

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

33

“Get in the car! On the double!”

Daddy’s command boomed from upstairs out to the front

porch. I was sure Henry’s wailing could be heard for miles. I

felt very sorry for my little brother, but I wasn’t sure that we

weren’t next.Timmy and I weren’t sure if Daddy meant for
us,
or

someone else,
to get in the car. We heard Daddy stomping down

the steps. Next, the screen door flung open, slammed against the

back wall and he pointed his index finger at me and then Timmy.

“You children deaf ?”

“No, sir,” we answered together.

“Then, get in the damn car when I tell you to!”

The screen door slammed again behind him and we jumped

up and followed his lead down the hall, into the kitchen, out the

back door and down the steps. He was on another rampage and

for whatever cryptic reason he had, he wanted us to go some-

place with him.We said not one word to each other or to him.

We got in the car before he had the chance to consider box-

ing our ears, as he often did when his fury got the best of him.

We’d unearth the details with our silence.

We were the children of a gifted and brilliant man, a World

War II veteran, a civil engineer who had graduated with high

honors from Georgia Tech, an adored and only son. Daddy was

tall and handsome, with piercing brown eyes and straight brown

hair. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses, which wrapped tightly

around the backs of his ears. On sight, he could’ve passed for a

diplomat. His laugh and voice were loud, no, enormous. We

wondered if he hadn’t suffered a hearing loss during the war.

His parents, dead for nearly a decade from heart ailments,

were a quiet Baptist couple who had prided themselves on refine-

ment and doted on their son. Daddy had been accustomed to

getting his way, but everything about his life with our mother’s

French-Irish Island family had denied him that privilege. It would

have required the patience of a thousand saints to tolerate our

house and there was no news of a pope traveling to Sullivan’s

Island to canonize our father. Daily doses of our family drama and

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the chaos of our grandparents’ infirmities fed his rage like shovels

of coal feed the furnace of a tramp steamer.

And he was having trouble at work. As an engineer, Daddy

and his partner had been awarded a contract from the South

Carolina Department of Education to build a new school in the

country, in a colored area, which was slated to be integrated by

bussing. Daddy had figured out how to heat the school, build a

new gymnasium, a cafeteria and a library, all on a shoestring bud-

get. That wasn’t such a big deal; certainly there was no uprising

from the colored people. But there sure was noise from the

Department of Education and the local school boards.The real-

ity was that no white family would bus their children there and

it would always remain a colored school. This infuriated the

authorities, who claimed that our daddy’s plans would lead to

having to upgrade the rural colored schools all over South Car-

olina. Things were happening, such as him finding his tires

slashed and construction equipment destroyed, and he knew it

was the work of the Ku Klux Klan.

When I thought about him like that, I had empathy for

him. But when his demons bettered him, I ran for cover like

everyone else.

We lowered the car windows and didn’t utter a single syllable

about how hot the car was as he backed out of the driveway and