Spirit: A Lowcountry Odyssey

By Jordan McClung

This is a work of fiction written in the first person. It details the precarious development of a young man born into the remains of a coastal plantation culture that is reluctant to finish dying. He grows older and older dealing with racial, religious and philosophical issues, which he learns to live with, but not resolve. Some sex, lots of love, hate and traces of comic violence. Regional color from half a century in a perverse landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491857953

Jordan McClung

The author claims to be a tarnished product of coastal South Carolina white old family culture; southern (South & North Carolina) by education and experience. For better or worse, little of that culture took deep root. He has long been happily married and resides in North Carolina.

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© 2011, 2014 Jordan McClung. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 2/4/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5797-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5796-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-5795-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901479

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

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Prologue

ChapterI Anecdotes, Reflections, and Me

ChapterII Glimpses

ChapterII Recognizing Love

ChapterIII Honor

ChapterIV Welcome to Frederick’s

ChapterV Dolphins and Atman

ChapterVI Public Concerns and Private Anxieties

ChapterVII Parting and Whiskers

ChapterVIII Sir James and Mr. Capers

ChapterIX Astarte

ChapterX Incident on Market

ChapterXI Journal of the Road

ChapterXII Where the Heart Is

ChapterXIII Obsession

ChapterXIV What Now?

ChapterXV Crash

ChapterXVI Newsworthy

ChapterXVII Getting Better

ChapterXVIII Grand Tour

ChapterXIX Restart

ChapterXX On the Road Again

ChapterXXI A Veil Lifts on Bull Street

ChapterXXII Measure of Man

ChapterXXIII Twenty-First Century Bleak Harvest

ChapterXIV Coda

For Diana and Julia,

My favorite editor

PROLOGUE

The year must be 2012 because national elections are coming up. What a mess!

But, at the age of 74, I think my own life is all right—an evaluation I have recently arrived at. I may live to be a hundred or die tomorrow, hopefully sometime between those extremes. I worry about my prostate and my brain, but not excessively. I used to wonder who I was. Not sure it matters anymore or even that I understand such questions.

Both loved ones are close by and a solid mongrel dog shares ancestral land with me. I drink a little whiskey and, at risk to my white beard, smoke cigarettes. I have grown garrulous and may annoy with my awkward syntax and, in lieu of original thoughts, too many literary allusions—but no one is compelled to listen. It’s all right.

Whoever I am, or was, I think I should try to organize memories, however selective and unreliable, in case I should live too long and find myself with nothing else.

CHAPTER I

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Anecdotes, Reflections, and Me

We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us. Amen.

The Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (common meaning, I guessed, like praying all together in common) was presented October 16, 1787 in Philadelphia. But this was in Charleston County around 1951, I think, and my father was facing the altar and reading—or pretending to read, since he had memorized it all long ago. He was good. His voice and cadence could give you goose bumps. He was also good-looking there in his vestments; might have been in the movies and us lived in Hollywood. I was his acolyte and sat in my hard acolyte’s chair up against the wall just outside the altar rail. I was twelve or just turned thirteen and perhaps a little young for the job, carrying the cross and all. But most likely nobody else wanted it, not that I wanted it much either—though it made me feel a little important. I noticed that my nice white surplice had a wine stain on it and wished I had an extra one to wear—a surplus surplice, ha-ha.

Then it was time to stand up. I helped Daddy competently, holding this, handing that. Not really wanting to be there, but feeling important in a way. The choir and congregation sang a slow hymn, or at least, sang a hymn slowly. Daddy and I—I was certified: Bishop C. had confirmed me with big arthritic hands—took our portion of the flesh and blood, though the little wafer didn’t taste like flesh or like much of anything. The watered red wine was good—better than real blood would have been.

I sat back down and the first shift, about a dozen people, came and knelt, resting their elbows or forearms on the rail and cupping their hands, adjusting their positions to get comfortable. Their clothing rustled softly. The rail creaked beneath the weight of the bigger ones. A cough or two came from the congregation.

The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.

It sounded good and made me feel good.

Daddy distributed the wafer halves, which clicked and ticked into the hands of the receivers. They took them into their mouths by different methods—some with flicking tongue, some with nibbling rabbit lips. My father spoke distinctly and spaced his words just right. From the altar candles, I smelled hot wax and charring wick. There was a little pit in time where nothing was happening. Whatever there was to commune with, I felt close to communing with it. If there was to be transcendence, I was ready for it. Daddy held the pewter cup high and commenced to form a cross in the warm candle-scented air.

Someone among the kneelers popped a long, loud fart, the worst I had ever heard. My father was describing, gracefully and competently, the left arm of his crucifix, rising slightly on his toes, lengthening the little theatrical pause that he would have been making anyway. Everything seemed to stop. Foulness crept over us, putrescent and sulfurous with, I thought, a strong cabbage component.

It stank, displacing the godly odor of wax and wick. Was it you, Mr. Polite? Was it you, Miss Wilkins? No, you are too frail and feeble. You, Mr. Cheshire? You are shaped like a big blacksmith’s bellows in old-timey pictures that I’d seen and you would have the power. They all looked guilty, even with their eyes lowered, some still tonguing their wafers.

Farts are funny when you’re twelve or thirteen, but for some reason I didn’t have to struggle with giggles. Time restarted and moved again. Daddy came back down on his heels, completed his cross and continued. He presented the cup:

The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s Blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.

One by one Daddy shook hands with the congregation as they left our little church. He shook firmly and looked directly into their faces. Would the farter be able to meet his gaze, or would he, or she, look guiltily and shiftily away? We didn’t talk about the incident as we drove over the bridge and down the dirt-and-oyster shell road that took us home. He may still have been embarrassed. I had a strange feeling that, like most things, the fart may have meant more than it seemed and that I would end up thinking more about it later. I was already reflecting on the dichotomies of life, though I may not have learned that word yet.

I was a pure, rosy-cheeked lad back then. A decade later, my face had become somewhat disfigured—an accident, perhaps. If you live in this town, that feature might ring a bell. There is almost no vision in my right eye. I limp some and sometimes carry a cane. That combination kept me out of the draft, so it wasn’t a total loss, since I could have died in warfare. That is a conclusion I came to long ago. I am still not ready to die, though I am pretty old. My right arm and that side of my skinny body are sort of depigmented and puckered in spots. In recent decades, a sometimes unkempt and dirty beard has hidden most of my face. But don’t let me exaggerate. I’ve never really been ugly. The accident was a product of youthful idealism and had its comic side when I think back on it. That story is coming later.

My family used to own a plantation on land granted long ago by a king, who had received it fair and square from God. At some point, the place got named Tallowick. I’m sure there was a reason to name it that, though nobody ever told me. Maybe they used to make lots of tallow candles there and stick wicks in them. At one point before the "Waw", we had about 100 happy darkies singing and grinning and producing mainly rice, some cotton and other things. Most of the land—except for about fifty acres—was gone long before I was born. We lived in the little house on high brick supports by the creek. The house was little only in comparison to the big house which had burned down before my time.

My daddy and mama split up right after South Carolina re-legalized divorce. Divorce had briefly been legal in the days when our laws were being made by negroes and aliens, as the News and Courier editorially expressed it. But later, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Tillman constitution restored morality and Christian values for a couple of generations. Which means I must have been about ten or so when Mama left us. Some photographs of her remained in the house for a while until my father noticed them and packed them away. There was no great drama or trauma about custody of me. I don’t know if I was a happy child or not. Sometimes I felt guilty that Mother’s betrayal was not as destructive of my little psyche as I thought it should have been.

When I was still pretty young, my father lost interest in working for the Episcopal Church and gave up his parish. Whether the Eucharist-flatulence affair had anything to do with his decision, he never said. It was a small loss. He sold insurance and Dodge cars in Charleston and made more money at that.

My father was never a cruel or violent man and would not have stolen anybody’s property or betrayed his country, but I don’t think he reflected much on abstract principles like good and evil or what things meant. Also, though there were some happy times, he seemed to lack warmth. I may not be rich in that myself, but Daddy probably had less. He drank more as time went on and sold less insurance and fewer Dodges. One evening, maudlin from some Cane Hoy white whisky, Daddy lurched to his feet when I entered the parlor. He almost sank back down, then fell against me and latched tightly onto my shoulders.

Son, I have stood by and watched my life turn to dust. Now there is nothing I can do about it. Don’t let that happen to you. He trembled.

Your life is not dust, Daddy, was all the comfort I could give him.

That was the closest we were going to get emotionally. It was good for us both.

My parents, or just Daddy, had named me Paul after the apostle. I was born on one of his Saint days, June 29. Good name for me. In a book of religious art we had at home, there was a painting by Caravaggio (c.1600) of Paul, conceived as a sturdy young man, stricken blind upon the earth, arm upraised, while his docile horse looked down for instructions. Could I view that figure on the ground as in some way my own self?

Somehow, I was always in the world but not always of the world. Gnostic-Platonist-Greek-Turk-Jew Paul might have been an old fart in his time, but he was intelligent and brave. He seemed to speak to me each Sunday in the Episcopal church, surrounded by hypocrites and others, as I drowsily listened to Daddy reading the Epistle until he said Here endeth the Epistle. Epistle. A funny word with piss in the middle of it. Here endeth the Epithle, ha-ha.

Everything hid something in those days. Sometimes I got glimpses of revelations that seemed to be lurking behind the obvious, the external. Life’s frames flickering as if I were looking into the lens of a movie projector running with its sprockets clicking and its light fluttering. Early in my life, Daddy, who had been a top student in Greek at Sewanee, showed me my saint’s key word pneuma. Spirit.

Spirits, specters, shadows. It seemed appropriate. Like my Saint Paul, who was lost in the spirit of God, I often felt lost in the shadows of my thoughts, the shadow of Saint Paul, the shadows of life and death.

Daddy taught me how to write pneuma in Greek and to pronounce it with all the letters sounded: p-ne-u-ma. I thought of high winds, drills, air pumps, tires and lung ailments and came to belive that pneuma was the source of my little inner glimpses.

CHAPTER II

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Glimpses

Morris.

Morris was one of the best people of any color I ever knew. His presence always calmed me. He lived with his Ma and his sister Lettie a mile or so from us. We all know the story about the black kid and white kid that play together like brothers until a certain age when their lives diverge—a story from our region’s ugly past. That never happened with ole Morris and me. We couldn’t go to the same school, but we were always important to each other.

On our creek we could see snakes, turtles, crabs (both fiddler and Atlantic blue), fish, rarely an alligator, raccoons, possums, and an occasional white-tail deer. We could both see and feel mosquitoes. Except for the mosquitoes, they were my friends, though maybe I wasn’t always theirs. And squirrels, of course, that we shot out of mossy oaks or mossless pines and ate—not bad parboiled, fried in cornmeal and bacon grease or lard. We always had a little boat to row, but later we got a 7.5 horsepower Scott-Atwater motor that took us (usually just me or me and Morris) out to the river and into open water. An aging mutt named Jerry and a battle-scarred cat without an official name shared our life and space at Tallowick.

Kerosene Joe.

A lot of things felt good back then and I never wanted to die. I still don’t. How could anybody look at the creek in the evening or at dawn with the mist over it or hear the rising tide popping in the marsh with the fiddler crabs clicking around and not want to stay alive?

I guess some people could. Kerosene Joe, who lived in a shack by the same creek and who was exposed to the same stimuli as the rest of us, hanged himself at the end of his little boat dock from a beam across the top of a rack he had made for drying his cast nets. Morris and I found him there early in the morning—the marsh was still misty—while we were looking for a good place to drop some crab traps. We looked up at him for a minute and then hurried to tell Daddy. As a Christian and still a pastor, Daddy said Kerosene Joe was in Eternity.

Joe, being lonely, was one of those rare adults who could talk to children about his experiences and feelings. For example, he sometimes told Morris and me about his war adventures in the Pacific Theater.

"I had a M1 and some ammo and supposed to guard the gate to a goddamn big plantation in Hawaii so the goddamn Japs couldn’t steal no pineapples—like I could stop ‘em.

"Shit, I would of invited the motherfuckers in to enjoy the pineapples and burn the motherfuckin’ plantation down. ‘I ain’t in ya’ll’s way. Shit, I’ll help ya’ll burn the motherfucker down. If this was American property, national property, that we all got a share in, I’d shoot at ya’ an’ y’all cut me down, but I ain’t no goddamn policeman to guard rich man’s private pineapples, hell no’. Not that they coulda understood. Now ya’ll boys run home and study so ya’ don’t grow up to be no ain’t-worth-shit bum like me."

He always spoke in rapid spurts between long silences and probably lied a lot, but Morris and I enjoyed listening and missed him when he was gone.

Donna

Donna was about a year older than me; thin, pale-skinned and dark-haired, freckled across her nose and in the seventh grade. She didn’t live right down by the creek, but pretty close. One day when I was about twelve, she came over for a ride in our boat with the new motor.

You want to see my pussy? she asked. She didn’t have a kitty cat with her.

Ummm…well, I guess. I wasn’t afraid, only nervous.

I’ve done seen boys’ things. You probably don’t know much about girls yet.

Donna took my hand and pulled me behind the little shed where we kept the motor and took off her clothes.

Open it up, she commanded. Don’t take too long.

Jesus Christ! Behold, I will show you a mystery, the Apostle Paul had written. It was so complicated that I thought I would never remember the whole structure of it.

Damn!

Feel my titties if you want to.

I felt them, but there wasn’t much to feel. A little later we went for a ride down the creek and out into the river and back.

After that, Donna became a place of holy worship, but, like my Saint, an unattainable ideal. She was at once a friend, a sister, and a church…or, at least, a church door. I would have felt guilty just kissing her.

Because she and I were good friends and hung around together, the kids started saying she was my girlfriend and making kissing sounds when they saw us together. She was a nice person and not mean and snotty. We had read about people becoming blood brothers and felt an impulse to bond to each other there by the creek. I tried to cut into the webbing at the base of my left thumb with my pocket knife. I sawed away but the skin wouldn’t break. My willpower was too weak. Donna was a tomboy and not scared of much. Once Morris and I watched in admiration as she let, without flinching, a fearsome, big black spider spider-walk up her white arm.

Donna picked up a keen-edged, unweathered oyster shell and—zip—she sliced the pad of her own left thumb, opening a little channel of dark blood, then passed the shell to me. I closed my eyes and cut myself. We pressed our cuts together.

Blood brothers, said Donna.

Blood brother and sister—blood siblings.

Yeah, siblings. You and your damn book words. We pressed harder.

Paul, if we ever want to do it after this, you know we can’t. Incest.

Words and numbers.

Math was my favorite subject. Maybe it was the only thing that expressed the truth and that nobody could argue with. Somewhere in the beauty of mathematics I imagined all universal secrets could be revealed. Had Saint Paul been good at it? It was hard to pay attention in most other classes.

But math lacked a human dimension that literature offered. I read all the time: adventure, novels, history, poetry, the Bible. Whenever the county bookmobile showed up at school it brought some request I had made. Morris couldn’t use the regular white library, but the bookmobile came to his school as well. I shared books with him too, and we read a lot together.

There’s a limit to what you can learn from books or anything else, Daddy said. The greatest folly is to imagine that wisdom is attainable.

He might have been right. When he said it, I probably looked up from my Modern Library edition of Karamazov or retreated into meditation on Donna’s mystic portal.

The Coronet.

Daddy’s values and desires had become more concrete and were expressed in his new 1953 Dodge Coronet—pale blue and cream-colored. Concrete for him, anyway. For me it was so perfect in form and color that I imagined hearing my old Apostle, speaking silent English and standing with ragged beard and scaly scalp and gesturing with skinny finger, presenting the Dodge: Behold, I will show you a mystery.

Let’s take her for a spin, said my father.

The Palmetto State used to issue licenses to fourteen-year olds and I was almost fifteen at that time. After he got the Dodge, we soon went down and I passed that easy damn test. The Dodge was mine a lot of the time, because Daddy had gotten more and more into the habit of drinking—sometimes bad Berkley County ‘shine—and staying in the house when he wasn’t actually at work selling cars or insurance. He also found a girlfriend, Miss Nellie Dawn.

Nellie Dawn.

Nellie Dawn ran a business selling sea creatures to Charleston restaurants. She was sunburned and thin with yellow hair. And strong: it hurt when she first shook my hand. She and Daddy seemed to enjoy each other, and I learned to like her. She became a great customer for the crabs and fish Morris and I caught.

To improve our sales, we stopped with cast-net mullet and hook-and-line croaker, spot and whiting and shifted our focus to crustacea—crabs. Sometimes Donna helped us and made herself a few bucks.

The crabs and what we inflicted on them began to trouble me, though, and I had to steel my heart. Crabs, in a bushel basket with a few loose in the boat, compact and immanent. Emblem of undivided, pre-conscious divinity. Lacking self-perception and self-image, for all their high-stalked eyes, bubbling their spit. Life-in-death. Death-in-life.

I liked to watch them and try to not-think, seeking a moment of original darkness in my mind. But one time, a giant rusty-clawed fucker in the bottom of the boat suddenly had me by the Achilles tendon. I was bleeding and in pain while Morris was prying that holy nipper loose and trying to avoid its other claw.

The Deed.

At sixteen, Morris and I still hung out together down along the creek, and Donna came and joined us sometimes. In those days a white girl had no business in the society of a colored boy without a white adult present, but her parents didn’t keep close watch on her. Luckily for us, they were a trashy family and left Donna a lot of freedom. For that matter, according to traditional thinking, Morris and I were getting too old to still be buddies. But the three of us had privacy by the creek. We practiced cussing, smoking, and drinking when we could get any beer or better. Morris had done it with two different girls before he turned sixteen.

What was it like? we asked.

Felt good, Morris said and smiled a little.

A senior at school had a supply of rubbers in little, individual packets that he retailed for a quarter each at lunch time. Teachers never paid any attention to us out under the trees, nor would they have cared much, anyway. I optimistically bought half a dozen, just in case, but my chances didn’t seem good anytime soon. Girls weren’t much attracted to my personality. Of course, Donna was not a possibility.

You all listen to me, Morris said one summer evening, flicking his cigarette butt way out into the marsh as the sun was setting. We ain’t done a damn thing. If we died tomorrow, we wouldn’t of done a goddamn thing. We wouldn’t leave nothin’, not a trace.

God, Morris, Donna laughed, looking very pretty. We still young. I’m 18 and you two even younger than me.

"True. But it scare me to think ’bout it. You gone and not a damn thing left behind. How people stand to think ’bout that? We got to have a purpose. And we got to be remembered for a Deed. "

Morris was right. Some of us may not feel fully of the world, but we all act in the world, and that was important. I was going to look for my Deed, eventually.

Diversions.

In spring and summer I played a little baseball with white boys, since I lacked the courage to bring Morris. I was fairly good both in the field and at bat, except that, sometimes, pneuma grabbed me at the wrong moment and I’d focus on an internal shadow instead of an easy fly ball and let it drop unchallenged or forget to swing on an easy pitch. This generally resulted in being called a shithead or something like that. I didn’t care much, though, when the shadow was worth it.

Mainly, I wanted to hang around the creek with Morris and Donna and smoke and drink, when we could find something to drink. And read. I stumbled onto Anatole France and Hermann Hesse. French writers were good, though nobody excelled Dickens. German novels seemed not to have real plots. They were more like long essays with characters and dialogue. Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Service were good poets. Joyce was good in Portrait and Ulysses had some funny parts and some interesting expressions like ineluctable modality. Roman Catholic lore was interesting but hard to read and just a little too clever. I tried to write some, but was never sure if there was much point in it.

Senior Year.

In the spring of 1955, Donna graduated from our high school. She was really beautiful by then, with her body filled out some. And I had recently realized that she was about as smart as me or Morris.

I’m gonna ride the damn bus to Atlanta and stay with my aunt and uncle and get a job and go to college if I can. I got ambition, you know. She couldn’t stand it near her trashy parents anymore.

We hugged and kissed and held hands by the creek. In deference to our childhood innocence, Little Ike hung limp as a shoestring, though normally he leapt up like Wordsworth’s heart within ten feet of a pretty girl.

You gonna write to me, I hope, I said.

"Yeah, I will. You