Brad Watson: The Heaven of Mercury

You have no memory of your own, of the storm, I expect.

I remember the sound of the wind, and of being cold and in the water, in the dark, and being cold on the little hill by the oak trees.

She felt a cool breeze and they were a memory of hands clapping, a singing around the fireplace in his old home down on the coast, here on the peninsula, before the storm that blew it away, when she and her mother and father still lived with him and her grandmother there, before Pud and Lucy were born, and she smelled the heavy salt air, felt the cool freshness of the white sand outside the open windows, and heard the breeze in the tops of the longleaf pines, and the old heartpine house timbers groaned.

See here it is again, Pappy said. The sand white as sugar, the dunes high as the tops of the pines, and the little live oaks and the sea oats on them rustling and swaying, the tops of the little oaks swept back like wild women standing facing the wind so that their hair is blown back and their faces beautifully ravaged by it, and the white sand blowing in the little drifts and ribbing the upside of the dunes and in gentle swells down the sides toward the bay, stitched with the milkwort, the backdune drifts filled with the yellow flowering partridge pea and cropped up you see these wax myrtles and cacti and the yaupon holly, this wild rosemary, and you see these little holes for the ghost crabs and the beach mice, and their tracks leading to and fro. There was life everywhere, it was full and teeming with life, and with joy. There was no locks on any of our doors, which people say but it was true, here, there was simply no one and nothing to fear here, we knew everyone else and we knew the whole world here. We ate and lived on what was here, we needed nothing much from the outside. The fish from the sea. We kept pigs and cattle, a kind of longhorn which would feed on the palmettos and ranged the woods. And there were deer, chickens. Some things would not grow well and we traded for those from inland, but most what we needed we kept or raised.

The floor of the little bay there was full of sweet oysters you could scoop up in your hands, and the wild ducks came in the fall and stayed all winter long, part of the Lord’s bounty. In the evenings in good weather the young people made fires of driftwood on the beach and gathered to sing songs and talk and to hunt for the sea turtles when the moon was full, and the ones in love would walk the sandy paths among the dunes. We had dances for them. It was an innocence.

We truly were a happy people. Some said they didn’t miss it after it was gone but I did, aye, I still do miss every leaf and little grain of sand. We were three generations here, going on four, and most of us bar pilots. We moved by water, every boy sailing small boats as easy as breathing, came natural to us. This is where we belonged, see. It was like being made to leave paradise and the only life we knew, when it was destroyed. But we couldn’t go back for the very land itself was washed away, nothing left. Wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing to do but find another life somewhere. That’s why we moved inland.

It almost seemed it was a punishment. Like we had grown proud and inward. You can have a little world of your own but you cannot be so proud that you shut out the rest of the world entirely. Cousins marrying, such as that. A taking advantage of the bounty, it seemed it was. I don’t know. A vague corruption, child. And then come the flood. It seemed like something terrible from the good book, to me.

The day before the storm it was raining hard and steady, and there was a blow. We watched it from the south beach and went home. Late in the evening there was a terrific crash in the sky, and a flash of light. We tried to go to the south beach again but had to take a rowboat where we’d walked earlier, the water was already so high. And by three or four in the morning it was blowing so hard the houses shook, and the water rushed beneath the houses, and the driftwood logs it carried bumped and crashed against the pilings and the floors.

Those who’d been back to the south beach later said the water had been like a great gray wall coming toward the shore, and it was all about us in that blackness later on. Not another flash of lightning, no more thunder, just a terrible roaring and howling of the wind. I and your father made our way to the Dixons’ next house down to see how they were faring, pulling our way by the limbs of strong shrubs and the smaller trees. And when we arrived there we could see a lantern light in their upper floor and their faces in the dormer windows, and as we approached their gallery the whole house gave way and floated into the bay like a doomed ship departing, their hands reaching out the windows for salvation where there was none.

We made straight back to the house and gathered you all up, and lashed ourselves together with rope, and when we stepped off the gallery we had to hold you above our heads as the water was then shoulder deep. There was an old longhorn there at the edge of the gallery and we held to his horns and drove him to the edge of the yard towards high ground, to the fence, where we let him go and he was washed away. We knocked down the fence to get to the little hill where there were four strong oak trees, and when we got there we lashed ourselves to them, and each to the other. And others arrived there in the storm, finding some way, and they lay flat on the ground, and clutched onto us, trying not not to be blown away by the wind. McCutcheon was struck in the face by a flying piece of driftwood and died there on the spot. Something struck me in the chest and your grandmother held me up as I was unconscious for a while, else I’d have drowned then as the water was for a while even up over the little hill itself.

We held on there through the night, and when dawn came the water had gone down some and the gale died a bit, though it was still strong. Still we found oranges lying about that had been knocked from trees in the grove, and we found potatoes there, and a single egg lying there, a single egg! On the ground. When the water had gone down a bit more we dug up fence posts that were miraculously dry and managed to make a fire and roast that egg and feed it to you and the other two young ones there with us. We found jars of preserves floating in a few inches of water in the kitchen and ate them from the jars with our fingers, they was the best thing we ever tasted. I’ll bet you remember that.

After the soldiers came in their rowboats to rescue us and take us to the fort, after the waters had finally subsided, we returned to search for the dead. But all we could find was the body of poor Agnes Drummond, whose children and husband were lost and not to be recovered, in the ruins of her home, her hair which had been beautiful and rich in color now a tangled gray and matted about her stricken face and shoulders.

And where our home had been there was nothing but a little body of water, a still pond, and the high dunes were gone save the one that saved us. And the only home of the dozen or more that had stood there was the little plank house John Keesler had built with his own hands, and it skewed and bent like a freak house at the fair, you couldn’t stand on its floors and keep your balance.

Some said we should find another place like this and rebuild, all together, those that survived, but we hadn’t the heart to do it, child. This place itself was gone, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth, and we couldn’t help but see it as a sign that a time and place had ended and we should move on. That’s when the Bateses helped us move up to Mercury. And so it’s been, so it was.

If we have faltered as a family it is my fault, for letting the loss of this life I knew discourage me, so that I lost something of my sense of who we were, and I could not see life clearly from the new place that we came to live. I lived in confusion for some time, and was not wise as I should have been. If we had been here you never would have married Earl, though I think still he was not a bad man, he just had no vision, he plowed headlong into life like a man afraid, and I think most men are afraid. I cannot fault him for that for after we left here I knew some of that fear and lack of vision. It’s the age, it’s the way we live, it’s difficult to overcome. I lost faith for a time in the ability of God to lead us, to give us that vision. I closed my eyes to his sight, and lost mine own.