A True Story

Introduction: I have been suffering from writer's block on my novel, so I decided to write an all-true short story from my youth in Dixie. Here is is, gentle readers, about 3000 words.

When I was a kid and my parents were still married, we lived in Bluffton, South Carolina. Our house used to be just a summer house in my grandmother’s day, a place to escape from the Savannah heat, but we lived there year round. My dad still lives there now, but it’s all fixed up. It used to be falling down. It’s right on the May river, atop a forty-foot bluff; it’s the highest piece of land in the county. That’s because the whole rest of the place is about two inches above sea level. The house looks out over the marshes and a big sand bar that formed over a wrecked barge years ago. Before the hurricane took our dock away we had a boat and could go across to the sand bar. You can find fossilized shark’s teeth there, black and needle-sharp. It seems as if they should run out, but there are always more. Back at the time I’m writing about we still had a dock.

Viewed from the side, the house was about one-third screened porch, with the “front porches” facing the river. Upstairs was the sleeping porch, and my parents used to sleep out there for as much of the year as possible. That was my mother’s doing, I found out later. My dad never slept out there after she left. He would never let us get air conditioning, either, because he said you just felt hotter when you went outside afterwards. I always thought that was stupid, since you felt cooler while you were inside. He has it now.

There was another porch off the kitchen, the “back porch”, on the side where you first went in the house. That made for confusion sometimes. Also, there was a huge live oak drooping over the house, with spanish moss all over it like gray streamers, and a pretty rock and herb garden, and a regular vegetable garden, and a decrepit garage with the words “Mao is Acid” and “Acid is God” painted on the two sliding doors. We always left one open, covering the other, and I can’t remember now which one was always visible. “Acid is God”, I think. I should ask my brother. And there was a hen house with chickens in a little yard, and a pen for my pony, and then about 7 acres of woods.

Actually, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this about the house, because the story isn’t about that. It’s really about the Cram’s house. They lived on an island in the May river called, variously, Potato Island, Voodoo Island, and Devil’s Elbow Island. I’ve never seen it from the air, so I’m not sure whether it’s shaped more like a potato or an elbow. As for the voodoo thing, you’ll see about that.

Harry Cram, the father, was the black sheep of a good WASPy family from up in New York. My mom’s family knew his family up there, or maybe in Darien. He was permanently exiled to the south for some offense, but I’ve never known what. Something pretty serious. He had three sons, and we were friends with the youngest one, Pete Cram. He’s a little younger than my parents. We all used to go over to Potato Island for big parties; I can only imagine that the elder Crams were out of town. They were there sometimes, I know.
The Crams were certainly among the richest people in town, if they weren’t the richest. One night two Army rangers, off-duty from the base outside Savannah, went over there to rob them. I didn’t learn about this story until a long time later, after we had left South Carolina. They went across the river in scuba suits, at night. Did they walk across the bottom? That would have been terrifying. I don’t know what time of year it was. In the summer the water is the color of strong tea, and you can’t see your hand more than five inches under the water, except as a white blur. Let’s say they swam. In the winter the water is a little clearer, too, but not so much. It still would have been scary, but rangers are tough.

They must have taken off the flippers to walk up to the house. They climbed in a window, and went to the room where Pete was sleeping. He was nineteen then. They had knives, those big diving knives with the serrations at the base, and they held one to his throat and marched him down to his parents’ door. They told him what to say, and he did. He told his dad there were two guys out there with a knife at his throat and so on. I think Pete must have known what was coming. His dad pulled the door open all of a sudden, shouted “duck” to his son, and shot both robbers with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Mrs. Cram was standing right behind him with a .45. I don’t know whether she fired or not. Pete was fine. The two rangers were apparently quite decapitated by the blasts.

No question about self-defense there, and that was the end of it, except that the Crams bought all these Dobermans. They kept them in a cage during the day, and let them roam around the island at night. I hated those dogs. They weren’t pets at all, not even to the Crams. I like dogs, normally. These dogs didn’t have real doggy eyes to look into, just round things like shiny stones, always turning this way and that to expose a little of the yellowed white, and teeth in their black gums. No dog inside to look back at you, just a vibrating thing like a wire.

The Crams had peacocks, too, though not as a security measure. I didn’t like them either, because they scream like someone being murdered. Now is probably the time to mention that Potato Island, or whatever you want to call it, is just an evil place. This might seem like a retrojection of later attitudes, but it’s not. I was always scared of it. I know, show don’t tell, blah, blah, blah, but I’m just going to come out and tell you that an indefineable miasma hung over the whole island. There was this place at the back called the “monastery”, because during the late sixties some kind of monks lived there before the Crams had to kick them all out. Don’t ask me. It looked like a cheaply built motel, just a line of single bedrooms forming an ell. The doors were all locked, and leaves and junk collected in the ell. As kids we would dare each other to go stand in there. I’m willing to swear that whatever those “monks” were up to, it was some bad, bad stuff.

Whenever I think of being on the island, I remember it was dark. Not nighttime, but just dim, with only a little light coming down through the trees. In the entryway of the house was a long trestle table covered with taxidermied creatures: owls, raccoons, some sort of weaselly thing with a realistic snarl. A bobcat. I guess Mr. Cram shot them all, though who would want to shoot an owl, I can’t imagine.

Once there were lots of children at a party there. My godfather, George Westerfield, decided to entertain us by taking us all out to feed the chickens. George is a wonderful person. He’s sort of fat now, but he was young and strong then, not fat but just big, with broad shoulders and a black moustache, always gently teasing. We were all trailing after him in a line, and I was right next to him, so I was the only one who saw what he saw when he opened the door to the strangely quiet hen house. Someone had killed all the chickens, and buried them head down in the earthen floor of the hen house. They were all in a circle, just the feet sticking stiffly out of the ground, with one in the center (the rooster?). There was a little wooden cross between each pair of scaly feet, homemade-looking, bound at the junction with the vein from the middle of a palmetto frond.

George slammed the door shut, and scooped me up in his arms to whisper that I shouldn’t scare the other children, and quickly thought of something else for us to do. Bait the crab traps? Not play with the dogs, that’s for sure.

Now that I think about it, it’s not true that I only remember it being dim on Devil’s Elbow Island, because once Caroline Stanislawski and I tried to walk across the marsh at low tide. Not all the way to the shore, you couldn’t do that, but to a little island in the marsh. There are lots of these, little hillocks where marsh grass gives way to scrubby oaks and palmettos and sandy soil. It was low tide, of course, so we could just walk through the marsh grass. It wasn’t terribly hot; it must have been spring or fall. Most people think the marsh smells terrible, but I like it. It does smell rotting, as all the broken-off ends of older marsh grass decay and compact at the base of the marsh. But it also smells salt and alive, and the new tips of the marsh grass are pretty and pale green. Deceptive, though, because they are sharp. Some parts of the marsh are solid, and you can walk on them all right, even though they are slippery. Other parts are just a scrim of light mud over a deep layer of greasy dark clay, and it was in at a place like this that I sank to my knees, losing one shoe at the bottom of a sucking hole. I can’t remember now whether it was this that made us turn back, or whether we were stopped by a hidden creek too deep to ford.

In any case, it was stupid to be going out there alone, and I don’t know what my mom was thinking in letting us, if she knew. We couldn’t have been any older than seven. All those little islands are just crawling with snakes. Then again, I guess all the woods are too, and you’ve got to play somewhere. It’s surprising to me that no one much ever seems to get bitten. I remember one time I was biking around the trailer park where Caroline lived, on a bike I borrowed from her older cousin. It was dusk on a summer evening, and the dirt road ran palely through a wooded section. There, right in front of me, a huge rattlesnake was crossing the road, big enough to take up two-thirds of it. I slammed on the brakes so hard that I fell off the seat and onto the bar (it was a boy’s bike, and much too big for me). I managed to keep the bike up, but I was in too much pain to move, not breathing right, just staring through the tears as the snake poured itself slowly across the road and into the weeds at the other side. Then I backed the bike up with little baby steps until I felt it was safe to turn it around, and walked it back to her trailer on my spongy legs.

The times you’d really think someone would get bitten were when people would bring live rattlesnakes out to our house, because we used the skins at our leather store. (It was a failed hippie business venture.) Strangers would drive down our driveway in pickup trucks, and we would go around to look in the back. They put the snakes in burlap sacks, tied them shut, and just threw them back there. The sacks would be alive with movement and covered with wet spots of venom. At that point my brother and I had to go up to the back porch to watch from there while my dad and the guys let the snakes out one at a time, and killed and skinned them. They really do keep moving after they are dead; I have seen a headless, skinless column of meat and bone strike at the ground. My dad heard they died at sunset, so he buried one and then dug it up again after the sun went down. He said it was still moving slowly, all covered with dirt, so he just buried it again in disgust.

The reason it’s a wonder no one got bitten at times like that is that everyone was always wasted. Well, let’s be fair: often wasted. I think of one time Pete Cram brought over a bottle of tequila, and he and my mom and dad drank it on the back porch while listening to reggae from Pete’s van parked in the yard. Naturally much herb was smoked as well. After a while Pete was puking his guts up in the downstairs bathroom, which didn’t have a door, but just a South Carolina state flag hanging in the doorway. I was interested to see my mom in there torturing him with the shot glass holding the worm, waving it under his nose while he lost it into the toilet for the fourth or fifth time. Because no one was paying attention to us, Ben and I got to stay up late and we watched a movie about aliens that was too scary for us.

Sometimes I wonder what ever happened to Quaaludes. I guess they were originally a prescription drug diverted to illegal channels. Maybe the company just stopped making them? Sometimes I hear people say you can get them in Mexico, and I have to admit I’m curious. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. Well, they did get into knife fights sometimes, but what do you expect from bikers named “California Jack”? Pete Cram and my mom were sort of play-fighting one time, all fucked up on ludes and bourbon, and he knocked her down and gave her a real shiner. She had some story cooked up to tell the teachers of my Montessori school about it, but when she got there she found I had already told them that Pete punched her.

Things took a sort of seventies turn for the worse when some people we knew started smuggling cocaine. Mom had to permanently bar a certain person from our house when he showed up, not just with an Uzi and a sedan whose trunk was full of neatly wrapped 5-kilo bags (which could have been OK) but with his mafia babysitter, too, a person my mom really didn’t want around. I’ll let him remain nameless because I don’t want all those crazy Savannah Youmans’ on my ass.

You’re probably wondering who killed those chickens over at the Crams’ place, and the truth is, I don’t know. The likeliest thing is that someone was trying to put a voodoo curse on the Crams, someone whom Harry Cram had pissed off. Which is to say, it could have been anybody. You might think the whole voodoo angle means Harry had made some black person angry at him, but not necessarily. White people in South Carolina hire black people to do voodoo for them, either because they believe it might work, or because they know enough other people believe it that it will still do some harm.

Anyway, on the day I’m thinking about, we were over on Voodoo Island, mom and Ben and I. It was the second or third day of a party, so lots of people were asleep, or had gone back to town to get more beer, or whatever. It was quiet. Mom and I were in the kitchen, and she was mopping the floor. Why the hell should my mom be mopping the Crams’ floor? I’m sure it was filthy after the party, but this is just typical of a lot of bullshit rebelliousness of the time, that it was all built on the premise that some attractive, intelligent woman would be doing all the cleaning up. Fight the power, man! It wasn’t so dark that day; there was light slanting in from the back windows and gilding the wet floor.

Then my little brother Ben came in, looking worried. He was two and a half or three then, a cherubic boy.
“Mommy,” he said, “come see the scuba diving people in the hall.”

My mom went pale; I remember quite well wondering what could be wrong. She ran out into the hall with him, and I ran behind. “Show me,” she said. Ben led us down the hall to the doorstep of the Crams’ bedroom. My mom was upset, but calm. “Are they here now, sweetie?” She wanted very badly for him to say yes, so we could all play along about it.

“No. They’re gone now.” He reached down with one hand and touched the floor right in front of the door. When he brought it up it was damp, glistening damp in the pink folds of his baby hand. “See?”

We didn’t stop to get any of our things. We just ran for the boat, Ben in my mom’s arms and me running behind, both of us running as fast as we could, first past the cage full of barking dogs and then down the long road to the dock. I didn’t know why we were running, but I knew it was something terrible. Mom didn’t make us put on our life jackets or anything, and Ben and I just huddled together while she pulled at the cord to start the outboard, more and more frantic till it caught and we tore away across the glittering water. I don’t remember what happened after that. I’d say we never went back, to make it seem more dramatic, but the truth is, we did.

This story is all true. You might not think so, because maybe you don’t believe in ghosts, or maybe you’ll think there’s a better explanation for what happened. I have this embarassing problem: I believe in ghosts. I don’t have an overall world view that has any space for ghosts in it, though. I don’t think there is an afterlife, and I’m certain that there’s no ectoplasm. I’m sort of on the fence about souls. No, no, that’s silly; I guess there aren’t souls either, how could there be? So you could say I don’t believe in ghosts. But then, I’ve actually seen ghosts myself, so I believe in them. (This is a different ghost story, however.) It’s as if I have a more or less coherent view of the world, mechanistic and rational, and then there’s a sort of ugly box over in the corner with a belief in ghosts inside it, rolling around in the dust. It’s lonely and rejected, and only gets to come out when I tell true ghost stories or actually see ghosts. I should try to develop a sub-belief in pixies or something to keep it company. I’m probably lying about not believing in souls, though. I guess they can be in there together.

Comments

[ian]

"No dog inside to look back at you, just a vibrating thing like a wire."

Just fantastic. I can do nothing else but doff my cap to you.

[Dan]

I loved the story, but it made me think of Catcher in the Rye. "DIGRESSION!"

Tell the one about the ghosts now!

[Doug]

You're in good company with the incongruous beliefs set aside in a box somewhere. Quantum physicists, for example, have a tidy set of beliefs for just about everything, except gravity, which they've set aside in a box. Cosmologists are ok with gravity, but have to do something similar with quantum mechanics.

[fontana labs]

That's nifty. You know, pretty much any stories about that childhood (hippies, weirdness, southern gothic) would be interesting, with or without ghosts.

Thanks for the shout-out the other day, too.

[Great story]

I read the story about Harry Cram in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Some of the details were a little different (Marines, not Rangers, and bayonets, not diving knives), but it is still the same story. It gives me chills now knowing how someone actually remembers that story from their childhood -- that it's something that happened in close proximity to them. I guess it's a small world!