“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 creation
s. 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.’
“So Hugo rose out of those waters and twisted himself into bizarre and funneling shapes and he began his fearful trek to Charleston, holding a single tear from God’s eye. When he reached Charleston, he crushed the city. His weapons were the winds and rains and tides of God. He chopped down houses and blew away roofs and flooded streets. The only place that Hugo did not touch was the grave of Sheba Poe, which was as dry as a prayer book. Every flower ripped from the gardens of Charleston fell from the skies to honor her, sent to her grave by the hand of a loving and merciful God.
“This merciful God spared the lives of some people who waited out the storm on Water Street. He let them live for reasons all His own, and we will never begin to understand them. One of them was the lovely Molly Rutledge, who was born a princess in the Holy City and who grew up to become one of its queens. Her childhood was a cakewalk and a dream, and she had most loved her summers spent at her grandmother’s house on Sullivan’s Island. Queens often feel things that normal people are not allowed to feel. Molly feared for her grandmother’s house, for Weezie’s house. She went out to her stable and grabbed a peasant boy named Leo, who worked in the stable taking care of jackasses and chickens. She grabbed Leo by the ear and demanded he find a boat and take her to the island. Leo ran to commandeer a boat stolen by an evil police captain.
“As the crisp air rushed through the queen’s golden hair, she looked back at her hurt city with tears in her eyes. Then she smelled something foul and thought to herself that the peasant boy smelled exactly like a jackass. At the same time, Leo thought this queen smelled like tea olive or jasmine. As they neared the island, something stirred in the water. Molly found her boat surrounded by a magnificent but troubled school of porpoises. When she asked the porpoises what was the matter, a solemn voice called out that the pod had lost their queen during the storm. The queen was stranded on dry land but they could hear her crying out. Molly made a solemn vow to help. When a queen makes a pledge, it carries the rule of law.
“The boat rode the waves into the place where Weezie’s house had once been. Molly wept when she saw that the storm had taken Weezie’s house. But she called to the peasant boy, Leo. They ran together and found the stranded porpoise lying on a white couch in the ruins of a flooded, imploded house. The porpoise’s name was Sheba, and she looked lost and forlorn and abandoned. She had given up all hope of rescue and had resigned herself to a slow death in the fog now lifting off the waters. But another queen and a peasant boy who smelled like a jackass placed her on a piece of wood, and they struggled and grunted as they staggered beneath the weight of that lovely mammal. They tripped on sand dunes and their muscles spasmed in agony as they made it finally to the waves.
“The school of porpoises was watching the effort and began applauding. They danced across the waters with their tails; in a language that was not interpretable, a language known only to animals and very small children, they commanded that Molly and Leo remain strong and save the pretty monarch.
“In the ocean, Queen Sheba stirred to life. Then her king appeared beside her, and her honor guard rushed around her in the ecstasy of her survival. Molly cleaned the sand from her blowhole. Arching her beautiful tail, Sheba dove out into the great ocean, which was both her palace and her home.
“Queen Molly took Leo home and left him with the jackasses and the chickens; she went to her castle. She thought that the loss of Weezie’s house was more than made up for by the recovery of the porpoise Sheba. ‘Always choose life over possessions. Always!’ Queen Molly said, as she climbed into her bed for the night.
“Good night, Hugo. And farewell.”
As soon as I bowed my conclusion, Sarah announced, with conviction: “Twelve percent.”
“What about the goddess of the storm part?” Fraser asked. “That was my favorite part.”
“I’ve already written that,” I say. “What’s important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts. If I had each one of you tell me the story the same way I just told it, no one could do it. Now, is it time to get you rascals to bed?”
“No!” the kids chorus.
“Past time,” Fraser says.
When I go to bed on the couch, I find myself agitated and sleepless. I pour a glass of Grand Marnier and quietly tiptoe past the bedroom where Mother and Trevor sleep. The moon is out and it proves a bright comfort as I walk the road higher up the mountain until I find a shelf of exposed granite I can sit on to think about the rest of my life. I am thinking about the awful way Sheba died when a penny hits the rock beside me and bounces into the mountain laurel forest below.
“For your thoughts,” Molly says, sitting beside me and hooking her arm through mine. She takes the snifter and drinks a sip. Her breath grows orangey and sweet, like it was the night in San Francisco when she came to my bed.
“Sheba,” I say. “I wonder if she really wanted to marry me or was just joking around.”
“She thought her career was finished, Leo,” Molly says. “She wasn’t a big fan of Hollywood men. She wanted a kid. She wanted to settle down.”
“Sheba settling down? I don’t believe it for a second.”
“Me, neither. She had a restless spirit. A tormented soul. And a dreadful end.”
“You don’t know how dreadful.”
“Speaking of endings,” Molly says after a moment, “thanks for your story. I guess I can quit worrying about how to tell you. You let me know you already understood.”
“The queen always goes back to the castle,” I say. “I always knew you’d never leave Chad. And if it helps anything, I think it’s the right thing to do.”
“Please don’t go noble on me, Toad,” she says. “I can’t stand that. But I belong with Chad. I belong with my house and children. I belong where I was born to be.”
She isn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know, and I just nod. We sit there another moment in silence, then I bring our brief glimmer of forever to an end with, predictably, a joke. “If Chad ever beats you up or farts too loudly or just wakes up with bad breath and body odor, you can always come to me, Molly.”
She smiles, but her smile is sad. “If I leave, then your story won’t be true. And your story is true,” she says. “One hundred percent true.”
Molly kisses me, then walks back down the hill crowned by moonlight, now a goddess of these hills.
CHAPTER 29 Locked Doors
I return to a hurt city with the sound of chain saws echoing over the alleyways and cobblestones. Squat brown Dumpsters line the streets of the old town as workers fill them with waterlogged furniture. Whole libraries have died on their shelves and bookcases. Paintings of the founders of the colony find themselves tossed on junk heaps, sodden beyond recognition or hope of restoration. The shrimping fleet of Shem Creek has disappeared from the face of the earth. The corpses of sleek yachts lie marooned in the green flanks of the great salt marsh. A red fire truck lies upside down in the marsh behind Sullivan’s Island. Insurance agents who have lived quiet, low-key lives find themselves the busiest, most harried people in town, spending sleepless nights.
The reporters at the News and Courier do not lose their early grit and resolve. I consider myself lucky to have lived through my paper’s finest days. We hit the ground running every day and deliver the goods to our readers the following morning. Before, reading the News and Courier was a perfunctory, sometimes compulsive habit to start the day. But after Hugo, it has become a necessity, a road map to survival in the humid, haunted days that have followed the storm.
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sp; In the first week, a decadent, putrescent smell hangs over Charleston, caused by the rotting of sea life that Hugo had tossed ashore in its great tidal assault, stranding all varieties in ivy and honeysuckle vines. Molly finds a five-foot sand shark behind her guesthouse, decomposing in the bright sun. Some sewage lines have broken and the smell of excrement adds itself to the air we have to breathe. As I walk the city from north to south, east to west, covering all the neighborhoods, looking for human interest stories, I become conscious of a slight nausea I can’t shake. The bloated corpses of dogs and cats, raccoons and possums, seagulls and pelicans, add their decomposing stench to the miasma of foul smells that have hung over the city like a mist for a week.
On Monday morning, South Carolina Electric and Gas makes heroic progress in restoring power to the city. Because the telephone lines are mostly underground, the phone service returns with astonishing speed. After finishing my column, I check on the progress of the work crews who are cleaning up the houses of my mother and my friends. I drive to my mother’s house just in time to see the bed and mattress where my brother and I were conceived hurled into a Dumpster. The begrimed workers are making significant progress at the Rutledge mansions on East Bay Street. But as I walk up Water Street toward Niles and Fraser’s home, I smell the foulest odor I have encountered yet. I introduce myself to the crew chief, who is waiting outside the house, sitting in his idling pickup truck. He motions for me to get in the shotgun seat. I am grateful he has his air conditioner running on high.