Grace at Low Tide

PRAISE FOR Grace at Low Tide

This tender, good-hearted and moving tale of one Charleston girl’s coming of age gives us what so many books these days don’t: a character we can care about. Ms. Hart’s evocation of the ways of Charleston society—blueblood and redneck alike— is right on target, her evocation of the landscape down here sure and certain. And of course she’s made certain to include the three most important elements of any worthy Southern story: family, family, and family.

—BRET LOTT, best-selling author of Jewel and

A Song I Knew by Heart

"Grace at Low Tide, Hart’s first novel, is a aromatic bouillabaisse of Southern manners, island life, and God’s redemptive love. Readers who loved Oprah’s book picks will find this title in keeping with the best contemporary fiction."

—LYNN WAALKES, CBA Marketplace

Critics of evangelical novels often talk about the dearth of literary fiction in the Christian market, but this debut from South Carolina native Hart comes close to that coveted adjective . . . a promising novel by a lovely, gifted writer.

—Publishers Weekly

A delightful new writer! You’ll love Beth Webb Hart.

—GAYLE ROPER, author of Winter Winds and Spring Rain

"Grace at Low Tide is a beautiful story of the power one young woman’s faith can have. Beth Webb Hart perfectly captures the voice of a girl wizened too early by hardship, yet still essentially a teen at heart. Her struggle to find her way both within her family and out in the world will have you aching to see her succeed, and the lush setting of Southern island life is an education in an existence most of us will never encounter. A warm, wonderful book I’ll eagerly pass around to my friends."

—ALISON STROBEL, author of Worlds Collide

© 2005 by Beth Webb Hart

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NLT are from The Living Bible, © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NKJV are from The New King James Version®, © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hart, Beth Webb, 1971–

   Grace at low tide / Beth Webb Hart.

      p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59554-026-3 (trade paper)

   I. Title.

   PS3608.A78395G73 2005

   813'.6—dc22

2004026279

08 09 10 11 12 QW 9 8 7 6 5

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Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks be to God! And to the following: My agent, Rebecca Kurson, for her unwavering faith, and my editor, Ami McConnell whose direction made all of the difference. Thanks also to Deborah Wiseman, Amanda Bostic, and the entire Thomas Nelson Team.

I am grateful for R.H.W. Dillard and Jan Bailey who introduced me to creative writing as well as Gayle Roper and the Christian Writers Guild who opened the door with Thomas Nelson.

Much of this novel was written as part of my graduate thesis, and I would like to thank the following faculty at Sarah Lawrence College who served as my advisors: Linsey Abrams, Lucy Rosenthal, and Joan Silber. Thanks also to John and Carolyn Pelletier and Meghan R. Duckworth who put a roof over my head during those years, and Joe and Lynn Land, my employers, who allowed me time to write.

A special thanks goes to my beloved sisters, Peggy and Libby, and my sisters-in-Christ: Meredith, Lisa, Jeanne Anne, Holly, Amie Beth, Jenny, Amy L., and Amy W.S. Your ongoing prayer has made a profound impact on this book and my life.

Thanks to my mentor, Jean Corbett, who introduced me to the healing prayer ministry and to Dr. Thomas Hughes who served as my medical consultant.

I am deeply grateful to my parents, Betty and Joe Jelks, who have showered me with love, nurtured my faith, and provided an education in which I could pursue my desire to write.

This book is dedicated to my daughter, Frances, who daily fills my heart with joy, and my husband, Edward B. Hart, Jr., whose precious love buoys me in this and every pursuit.

Contents

1. Mama and the Debutramp

2. Sal’s Lowland Cuisine

3. Night Eyes

4. Good Neighbors and Bad Manners

5. Greater Gifts

6. Christmas Day

7. The Ebb

8. Edges

9. ID

10. Young Love

11. Sociable

12. Protection

13. Intersection

14. Freeze

15. Spirits

16. Lost Weekend

17. Resurrection

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly

we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed

day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving

for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we

fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For

what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

—2 CORINTHIANS 4:16–18

Blessed are those who trust in the LORD . . . They are

like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep

into the water. Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried

by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they

go right on producing delicious fruit.

—JEREMIAH 17:7–8 NLT

1

Mama and the Debutramp

"Fat is not the enemy," my mama says to me. She is sitting in her reading chair next to the sliding glass door with Easy the cat nestled behind her ankles. She sets the book down on her knee to look me over.

So what is? I say, grabbing one of Daddy’s peanut butter bars out of the bread basket in the kitchen.

Shouldn’t you cover your arms? she says. The creases on the inside of her black eyebrows deepen like the cracks in the ceiling above my bed, and a square pocket of skin forms at the top of her nose.

Nope, I say, that kitchen’s hot.

She gives one steady nod and says slowly, "Car-bo-hy-drates. Then she spreads her fingers out over the pages. I wish your father would read this book."

Love you, I say, and as I’m walking onto the porch she says, Careful tonight, dahlin’. They’re everywhere. She puts her hand on her chest and wheezes, Those deer.

Mama likes to diet and study the Bible. About a year ago she joined this group called First Place, which she describes as a Christ-centered weight-loss program. She drives all the way to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Charleston twice a week to pray with her small group and weigh in. So far she’s lost eleven pounds, but it’s hard for me to tell.

Mama’s got a funny shape. She says God took two different bodies, cut them in half, and sewed the opposites together. Her top, starting with her elongated neck, is noticeably thin—she’s got bony shoulders, a flat chest, and a tee-niny waist. She’s short and when she’s wearing a long skirt, you’d swear she was little all over. But her bottom half is round, with pockets of flesh spread from her hips to her knees like bread rolls. It’s like this: her wrists are pencil thin, but her ankles are as thick as potatoes.

Years ago at a beach party, I overheard my mama’s brother, Uncle Bobbie, talking to my daddy while Mama (in her skirted two-piece) took some of the kids down to play in the surf. He said, "If only she was like a tube of toothpaste, then you could just squeeze some of her up."

Daddy looked at my uncle then back to my mama as she stood in the surf, leaning over to wash something out of my cousin’s eye.

Can’t have it all, he said.

About time for work, eh? yells Daddy. He is about twenty yards away, in the fish shed by the dock. He’s slapping the dust out of the croaker sacks for the oyster roast as the tide empties out of the creek behind him, wide ripples of black water shaped like boomerangs hurling toward the sea. I can tell by how quick his bulky arms are moving that he’s in a better mood than usual. It’s two days before Christmas, and tomorrow the whole family—my brother, sister, and cousin—will be home. Family gatherings are one of the few events that make him happy.

I’m off to work, Dad, I say.

Mama says those deer are everywhere, he yells.

Yep, I say.

The last thing I want is another dent in the truck, he says.

I nod, and as I step carefully into the pickup, keeping my tennis socks from touching the layer of damp mud that is splayed across the door, he shouts, DeVeaux, and I can tell by his tone that he’s already irritated.

So I roll down the window and say sweetly, Yes, sir?

He walks toward me, dragging a croaker sack across the yard, his duck boots stamping the dark soil as he dodges the tire swing and shimmies between the tractor and the toolshed. He’s gained about twenty pounds since last spring, much of which seems to have attached itself to his neck and cheeks. Now his eyes become two slits when he smiles and when he yells.

As he reaches the teahouse where the truck is parked he says, Did you get the Orangeburg sausage?

You said you needed it by Christmas Eve, I say.

That’s tomorrow, honey, he says.

I’ll go first thing, I say.

I don’t want to have to ask you again, he says.

He turns his back and slaps the sack once, then he drags it back across the yard and throws it on the picnic table in the fish shed.

Daddy has been in a bad mood for most of my adolescence. (And you better take cover when that eerie half-grin spreads across his face, because that means he is about to blow.) Short tempers run in his side of the family, and sometimes when I get mad, I can feel my own temples pulse.

If you asked me what Daddy likes I’d have to say the sound of the television at a high volume and filling station food. He also loves to take off his pants before supper and walk around in his work shirt and white cotton boxers for the rest of the night. And he is often getting sick with gout in his feet so he can stay in bed all day with Mama waiting on him.

He used to love parties, dances at the Carolina Yacht Club, and oyster roasts on Wadmalaw Island. He was often hosting dinner socials at our home on Tradd Street in downtown Charleston, which ended with port cordials in the parlor where he would tell deer hunting stories and, if coaxed properly by guests, sing a few Gullah spirituals that Maum Bess, his nanny, taught him during the summers he spent at Rose Hill, a decaying sea-island cotton plantation that has been in his mama’s side of the family since 1810.

Then he’d announce, I ought to move out to Rose Hill and reacquaint myself with my heritage, feel the pluff mud settle like putty between my toes.

Mama would shake her head and mutter, He’s too much of a city boy for that life, then he’d end with her favorite song, Faddah, Len’ Me Your Walkin’ Shoe.

Truth be told, my father filed for bankruptcy five months ago. He had been developing a barrier island, Otter, which sits thirty miles south of the Charleston harbor, at the mouth of the North Edisto River. I can see Otter Island from the dock of the little caretaker’s house on Rose Hill Plantation where we now live (Daddy came back to his heritage, but not the way he had imagined it), and occasionally on a calm day at high tide, my father will drive his john-boat out of the creek and into the Intracoastal Waterway where he’ll circle Otter Island, counting the pink flags of the property lines: twenty-seven lots, ranging in value from $350,000 to $1,000,000, all of which have a 180-degree view of the Intracoastal Waterway or the Atlantic Ocean.

He borrowed the money to buy the property from his boyhood friend Dinks Edings, a local businessman who had made a small fortune by investing in the development of the Charleston Hotel and other sections of downtown King Street. I believe this is the big one, he had told my mama and his mama, Mee Maw Rose, two years ago as he poured three glasses of sherry in the living room of our downtown home on Tradd Street, the only home I’d ever lived in until now.

I’m told that Daddy used to be a stitch. When he was nineteen and his girlfriends were making their debut, he coordinated a Debutramp ball where he and a group of his contemporaries rented out the Hibernian Hall and invited all the members of the Charleston Hibernian Society to view the male version of debutantes, fifteen well-heeled Charleston boys who, dressed in T-shirts and tails and black Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, strutted down the ballroom while the members of the club lined up on both sides of the aisle, chuckling in their tuxedos, their white gloves poised. When the debutramps made their way to the president of the society, Dr. Joseph Jenkins, who was seated at the end of the ballroom, they’d curtsy and lift their pants to their knees, revealing their hairy legs. Dr. Jenkins nodded in approval and led the gloved applause, which sounded like a hundred ducks flapping their wings.

Mama and Daddy got together up in Virginia during college. She was at Hollins, and he was at Washington and Lee University. His boys choir, Southern Comfort, went down to the ladies’ school for a performance and Mama, who was the social activities chairman, greeted him at the school gates. They parked that very night on the top of Tinker Mountain, looking down at Mama’s school in the valley. Mama was from Greenville, South Carolina, and she was rich (a nouveau from the upstate is what Mee Maw Rose used to say). Mama’s daddy was a textile executive at JP Stevens and when she left for college he sent her off in the car of her choice, a baby-blue Chevrolet convertible, with a driver named Lawrence who carried her luggage into the dormitory.

Daddy passed for what they call a Charleston blue blood. He was the typical kind because his family fortune was dwindling and about all he had was a regular-sized house on Water Street (circa 1823) with the double front porch and the cobblestone driveway, a relative’s name on a building here and there, and a lot of good manners learned at Mrs. Hillhouse’s cotillion school. And, of course, Rose Hill Plantation, which is fifty miles out of town and across the Dawhoo River on a sea island called Edisto.

Mama and Daddy have two cardboard boxes filled with scratched-up 45 rpm records from their courting days. They say that in the summertime they used to park downtown at the Bayside Battery late at night with the radio turned up, take off their shoes, and shag down the sidewalk while the harbor lights blinked on and off.

Daddy’s little sister, Aunt Eliza, who died in a boating accident off the Edisto River just before I was born, would steal their shoes, sneak into the car, and quickly reverse it out of sight just as my parents noticed the music fading. On these occasions, they would walk across the White Point Gardens to Mee Maw Rose’s house on Water Street, their bare feet dodging the summer cockroaches that scurried in and out of the cracks along the road.

There are these old home movies of Daddy and Aunt Eliza that Mee Maw Rose used to show Virginia, Eli, and me when we’d spend the night at her house. We’d all pile into her bed, under the covers, and watch my father and aunt when they were barely old enough to walk, jumping naked over the sprinkler in Mee Maw’s garden. Or riding their bikes barefoot down Water Street, waving to the camera before zooming by.

There is only one movie of them when they are teenagers and it’s my favorite to watch, though nothing much happens in it. It is of the day Aunt Eliza went off to boarding school in Virginia for the first time and Daddy is driving her. He is thin and handsome, already a high school senior and number one on the tennis team, and just about to receive a scholarship to Washington and Lee University. He’s got a crew cut and a broad smile, and he’s dressed all preppy in an argyle sweater, khakis, and winter-white bucks. He is gracefully loading her luggage into the trunk and looking, every so often, out of the corner of his eye at the camera. Soon Aunt Eliza is beside him, her thick brown hair curled out and up around her shoulders. She’s dressed in pedal pushers and a cardigan and she’s looking excited, switching her weight back and forth. As Daddy comes up and puts his arm around her shoulders, she looks up at him, then looks back and mouths good-bye toward the camera. Then Daddy, his arm lightly on her elbow, walks her down the porch and into the car. He looks up just once with a grin before taking his own seat.

As they pull out of the driveway, Eliza puts on a pair of round, dark sunglasses and says, Bye, Mama! And then all you can see is the back of the car as it drives down the quiet street, their heads bobbing in conversation in the rearview mirror.

I like this movie because it allows me to see Daddy in a time when he had no burdens. When he was optimistic and capable and sure of himself. When his whole life was laid out before him like that highway to Richmond he carried his sister down, delivering her safely to school.

I used to imagine the rest of their trip to Virginia. I’d picture him kissing her good-bye at the door of her dormitory, and just as she starts to weep he says, Sister, you are going to be just fine.

Just before Daddy declared bankruptcy, Mee Maw Rose passed away, leaving him all that she had: her home on Water Street and Rose Hill Plantation. But he had to sell it all right away in one last attempt to save his shirt. Within three months after Mee Maw’s death, he had sold our home on Tradd, then her home on Water Street, and finally Rose Hill Plantation, which, as I said, has been in our family for more than one hundred and eighty years. He sold the plantation to a Japanese family, the Shuzukis, who live in Michigan and make cars. He arranged for our family to live in the four-room caretaker’s house that sits on the creek, adjacent to the main house. That’s where we are now, but Daddy says it won’t be for long. And I’m hanging on to his words.

Daddy’s job is to maintain the property, restoring the grounds and planting corn and okra to lure in the quail and deer. He’s also supposed to take the Shuzukis on boat rides and teach them how to fish and hunt.

He arranged for Maum Bess, his nanny, and her son, Chambers, to have an official title to the property in the woods behind the plantation where they have always lived. He hired Chambers, who has been farming the fields for Mee Maw Rose since boyhood, to be his right-hand man.

You’re the agricultural consultant, Daddy said to Chambers. But I’ll hand my job over to you once I work out my next business venture.

Yes, suh, Chambers said.

We’ll find a way out of this soon, he said to Mama and me the other day as he sent us to fetch the Shuzukis from the airport. Don’t you gals fret.

Now, I grew up in the city of Charleston and life was just beginning to take shape for me there. I’d survived my freshman year of high school without getting in any trouble, the first in our family who didn’t drink and have to go before a judge for the charge of possession of alcohol by a minor. My church had just gotten Bethany, the first female youth minister they’d ever had, and I was meeting with her and a group of girls for breakfast once a week and going to coed youth group on Wednesday nights. Sasser, one of my good old friends who is also the PK (priest’s kid) from my neighborhood, had taken me into his confidence over the mysterious and much gossiped about breakup of his parents’ marriage. He even got me praying, too, for the one request that seemed to permeate his every waking moment: that his mama would come to her senses and return home to him and his father. He has this vision that involves sitting around the dinner table again sharing the best and worst parts of their day as they had done for so many years.

So, I’m bored to tears out here on this dead island while I wait for Daddy’s plan to get us back to town. Not to mention that the tap water tastes rusty and the pluff mud from the creek manages to find its way onto everything, staining my T-shirts and attaching itself to the crevices on the bottoms of my shoes. And then there is Daddy’s temper, which has increased in its unpredictability over this last year. Mama and I have learned to navigate our way through him like a boat channeling a narrow creek at high tide, inching our way along in anticipation of the oyster-bed banks, their sharp shells poised just inches beneath the dark water.

But as I drive down the dirt road on my way to work at the restaurant, passing beneath the avenue of the gigantic, moss-covered live oak trees whose limbs stretch down to the ground like lazy fingers, even I have to admit that the sight of Rose Hill is grand. Sometimes, when I’m walking through the fields, I get stopped in my tracks and think that if it weren’t for my neon Nike tennis shoes and my Cooper Hall Class of 1999 sweatshirt, the year could be 1820 and my great-great-great-grandfather Edmund Seabrook Rose could be on the dock, loading his steamboat with bales of superfine cotton.

Edmund Seabrook Rose built the main house, which sits on the edge of a wide tidal creek. It is made of white clapboard with a two-story front porch and an iron railing bordering the portico and the double front steps, with the name Rose molded across the ironwork where the steps meet. And some historians think that the house was designed by the same man who designed the White House.

Between the creek and the house is a garden with a multitude of walkways that are bordered with boxwood and Cassina berry trees. Beyond the garden is the gall, a pond surrounded by palmettos and magnolias and azalea bushes that bloom in an abundance of pink and fuchsia each spring. Also on the property is a teahouse for dining and a ballroom where Edmund and his family hosted fancy dances in the golden days before, as Mee Maw Rose would say, the boll weevil and the Yankees invaded.

Just as I cross through the gates and onto the dirt road that leads to the restaurant, I spot a group of marsh myrtle-berry bushes in the middle of a plowed-down cornfield to the right. I leave the truck running as I walk into the open field to pick up a few branches, which the waitresses can use as decoration for the plates at the restaurant where I work. When I reach the bushes I hear the quick whisper of gunfire in the trees ahead like a one-word secret. Christmas marks the last weeks of deer hunting season, and I picture the tall, camouflage hunting stands that Daddy hides in the pines around the open fields at Rose Hill. I quickly turn and run back to the truck.

Thing is, I can’t deny that there is a hand on my life constantly steering me to safety. And I believe the hand is God’s. But as I’ve told Bethany and Sasser, I have a sense there is this thick barrier that keeps me from fully knowing Him the way they do. I don’t know what the barrier is or what I can do to remove it, so after a momentary blip of danger passes on the screen of my life, it is all too easy to forget about Him and His seemingly invisible hand. Sasser says it’s like a kind of amnesia that I contract over and over again, and I need to find a way to wake up from it.

2

Sal’s Lowland Cuisine

Idle hands are a devil’s workshop, Jeeter, the restaurant manager, says to me. He’s leaning to the side, one hand on the vacuum cleaner and the other cupping a White Russian cocktail in a clear plastic cup.

Sal, the proprietor, looks up from the reservation book. He scratches between his legs and turns to me. Tell Jeeter what a sissy drink that is.

I’m not in the mood for them so I just smile.

Then Sal says, And tell him to get his mangy dog out of my 11 restaurant.

Jeeter blows a kiss to Cocoa, his chocolate Labrador who has one yellow eye and one blue eye, then he shoos him out the screened door, shouting, In the truck.

Sal looks me up and down as I climb the ladder in the wait station and pull out some napkins for folding. So, what’s up, lady?

Nothing, I say, without meeting his jumpy eyes.

We gonna have fun tonight? he says.

Leave her alone, Sal, Suzanne, the head waitress, says as she walks in the back door. Don’t forget that she’s fifteen years old, or I’ll be the first one to report you to the police.

Sal grins.

How many we got on the books? Suzanne asks.

One hundred twelve, Sal says.

Holy mackerel, says Jeeter. Then he turns to me. DEE-EEVO, I need you to whip the rest of that lettuce in the freezer and slice a bunky load of lemons.

You’re such a dork, Jeeter, says Suzanne and she winks at me. You know, I can’t believe you actually have a wife. That you actually found someone to marry you.

She turns to the mirror at the back of the dining room and twists her hair up in a bun on the top of her head. Then she stabs the bun with a gold hair tong to keep it in place.

Shut up, Suzanne, he says, before I stick you in section B where Dr. Halverson sneaks peeks at your backside.

Put me wherever the tips are, Jeeter, she says as she outlines her lips with a pencil the color of mud. I’ve got to pay for that Barbie playhouse Becky wants for Christmas.

Suzanne is a friend of my cousin Eli. She is twenty-two years old, and she has a four-year-old named Becky she raises on her own. Suzanne and Becky live down on the beach in an apartment above the Edisto Realty Company, and I babysit Becky occasionally.

My title at the restaurant is busgirl, but basically I have to do whatever Jeeter tells me. I spend half my time in the kitchen making salads and desserts and biting off the mini-bottle caps for Suzanne’s drink orders. Then Jeeter’ll scream for me to get out on the floor where we’ll clear the tables, wipe down the seats, and reset everything. Sal’s is the only nice restaurant on the island, though we’re located across from the campgrounds in a cinder-block building that used to be a gas station. The other two eateries specialize in the fried fish buffet, so we’ve always got a decent crowd. We serve wine and grilled tuna, stuff that costs more than five dollars a meal, and every plate gets a helping of finely ground grits that Sal buys from a special farm in Mississippi. Tosha, the chef and cleaning lady, cooks the grits with whipping cream and butter. She lets them simmer all day long and at the end of the night, if there’s any left over, she’ll set aside a plastic cupful for me.

Sal might say he owns the place, but Suzanne says his daddy really owns it. My cousin Eli, who is like an older sister, got me this job on the condition that I steer clear of Sal.

He’s a slime, she warned. "He’s