Читать книгу Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 13

The Gray Man

Somewhere on the outskirts of

Pawleys Island, South Carolina

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The Scene: Pawleys Island is an Atlantic Coast barrier isle at the southern end of the Grand Strand, a ladyfinger of sand that stretches southward from Myrtle Beach to Georgetown, the oldest town in the state. It lies off Waccamaw Neck and is connected to the mainland by two bridges.

The Sights: Pawleys Island was one of the oldest resort areas on the east coast, a place of quiet solitude where rich men and planters built island homes to escape the threat of mosquitoes back on their plantations. Strong and restless winds kept the mosquitoes at bay. Other than boats and the fishermen who rowed them to the sea, the beaches were isolated and visited only by the tides that came to touch the shoreline. The elite hid away and claimed the isle for their own. It was a repository for good times and rich times and the times of their lives.

Pawleys Island did not remain a resort area solely for the rich and famous. It preferred then, as now, to simply be a carefree, barefoot, and laid back scepter of broad Atlantic sand that never worries about yesterday and hasn’t yet thought of tomorrow.

It is an isle of quaint fishing villages lined with cottages and inns, boasting just about as many hammocks as homes. But the Strand, they say, is haunted.

To the Strand comes the Gray Man who walks the surf line when the skies are black with storm warnings and leaves no footprints when he slips at last into the mist.

The Story: It was that kind of day.

Gray sand.

Gray sea.

Gray sky.

Gray time of day.

Nothing but gray, and the wind came riding across the waves, churning up a spray of angry whitecaps, which was the only color to blot the face of the Strand other than gray.

Thelma Allen had trouble breathing. Plenty of air. None in the lungs. Her chest felt as though someone was standing on her sternum and tightening its fist around her heart. It was hot and stifling on this sultry September afternoon. The last of the sun had been swallowed up by a blanket of gray clouds, and a searing wind dried the sweat that creased her face. She shuddered. There was a chill in the air, and it had nothing to do with the weather.

Thelma Allen and her husband were pioneering a building development on the southern tip of Pawleys Island, and it seemed to her that the last hinges of a desperate summer were hanging on to the Strand, refusing to let go, keeping the suffocating heat locked up on sands that had grown crusty and bare. The season had ended. Summer had forgotten to leave. Summer had trapped them all.

She walked out on her porch and lay down on a cot. The breeze should be cooler by now, she thought. It wasn’t. The man in the Red Cross store down the street swore that the hot air had been funneled across the Strand from the backdoor furnaces of hell.

The gray day turned to night, grayer still. The moon must be shining somewhere, but not on Pawleys Island. Sleep came and went as noiselessly as cat’s feet on a hot tin roof. Just before dawn, Thelma Allen opened her eyes. She did not know why. Nothing had startled her. Even the winds in the trees were traveling with hushed tones.

She saw someone standing in the inside doorway of her home.

A gray man.

On a gray morning.

Outlined against a gray sky.

With a gray sea feverishly raking the gray sands.

He was looking directly at her, but she could not see his eyes. There were black holes where his eyes should have been. She waited for him to speak.

Silence.

No words.

No smile.

The gray man stepped back into the shadows and was gone.

She ran to awaken my husband, and they turned on every light in the house. They moved together from one room to another. No one was there. Nothing was out of place. The windows were closed, the shutters buttoned up and battened down, and the doors were all locked, even the inside door, the place where the gray man stood. Outside, the mist and the fog and the darkness had become as one. No figure walked the sand. The gray was lost amidst the gray.

The gray sky was calm. A gray sky could lie to you. If a storm were brewing, it was hiding beyond the gray clouds. No one could read anything into the wind. The winds were always howling.

At a party the next afternoon, Thelma Allen mentioned that she had seen a figure among the shadows, and the sight of him gave her chills and a dark sense of foreboding. She did not believe in ghosts, but neither did she doubt the possibility of their existence.

It could have been a dream, but nightmares never came with her eyes wide open. She knew what she had seen, and what Thelma Allen had seen left her unsettled and afraid.

“Don’t worry,” said a friend.

“Why not?”

“It must have been the Gray Man.”

Thelma Allen frowned and narrowed her eyes. She and her husband were among the newcomers to Pawleys Island. She had seen the gray days, the gray skies, the gray seas, the gray sands, but had never heard of a gray man.

She raised an eyebrow. It was a question.

“You are a fortunate woman if the Gray Man comes,” the friend said. “He always walks the sands before a storm.”

“But he was in my house.”

“The message must have been urgent.”

“What message?”

“He wants you to leave.”

“He didn’t say anything.’

The friend smiled. “He doesn’t have to,” the friend said. “When he looks at you, you know what to do.”

“I certainly didn’t know.”

“You do now.”

Thelma Allen was perplexed. A little confused. Slightly shaken.”Who is the Gray Man?” she asked.

“No one knows for sure,” the friend said quietly. “But, I can tell you, he’s no stranger to Pawleys Island.”

He was first sighted, if the old, yellowed newspapers are correct, just before the hurricane of 1822, a fierce storm that hammered Charleston and killed more than three hundred people scattered across the connecting isles and marshlands. In 1893, the Gray Man walked out of the gray fog and appeared before the Lachicotte family. His eyes were dulled. His words were silenced in the winds. But the meaning of his arrival could not be denied or rebuked. The Lachicotte family frantically fled to the mainland before the Sea Islands Hurricane tore across the coast and left fifteen hundred people dead and dying in the devastation and debris.

Bill Collins and his bride had come to the Grand Strand on their honeymoon during a fateful autumn of 1954. During the approaching hours of dawn, a rapid knock was heard on their door. Collins opened it. A man stood before him dressed in rumpled clothing. He had a gray coat wrapped around his shoulders and a gray hat pulled low across his gray eyes. “I’ve been sent to tell you to leave,” the Gray Man whispered.

“Why should we?” Bill Collins was stunned, a little addled, and still trying to work his way from the gray fog of a deep sleep. “A big storm’s coming.”

Bill Collins always believed that he could smell a salty brine on the man’s clothes. The Gray Man did not move. He did not walk away. He simply faded into the woodwork. Bill Collins was staring into the dead of night.

The gray had gone black. He and his wife drove off Pawleys Island only hours before Hurricane Hazel struck the Atlantic coastline as a Category 4 storm. It would snatch away the lives of ninety-five and destroy more than fifteen thousand homes.

Thirty-five years later, Jack and Clara Moore were walking among the gray dunes during the last dying shadows of a September afternoon. All around them the day was the same.

Gray sands.

Gray skies.

Gray seas.

They saw him step from behind a dune and shuffle toward them. His clothes were as gray as his face. He looked old and tired, and they waited for him to come closer. His face was a portrait of sadness, painted in a curious shade of gray. Jack Moore yelled out to him, but his words died in the winds.

The Gray Man walked into the mist. The Moores looked around them. They saw no one else on the beach. They were alone.

Clara Moore promptly walked back to her home and packed her bags. She and Jack were leaving the island as darkness crawled across the sands and curled among the dunes. Two weeks later, the fragile isles were pounded by the unbridled fury of Hurricane Hugo, a Category 4 storm responsible for seventy-six deaths and more than $10 billion in damages.

He doesn’t come often, Thelma Allen was told. But when he does, it’s for a reason. Lives hang in the balance.

Some say it’s a young man coming home from a long voyage at sea. Maybe so. They say he was in such a hurry to see the girl who would be his bride that the young man rode off the main road and cut across country in a spirited effort to find a shortcut home. Perhaps. His horse raced across the marshlands and into a bog of quicksand.

Both man and beast died in the quagmire.

After the funeral, the young girl who would have been his bride, a fair lady in mourning, was walking the surf line of the beach as the first shards of moonlight cut across the sands. In the salt spray, she saw a gray figure huddled against the dunes.

The face was so familiar. The eyes she would never forget. She heard his words but not his voice. “Get off the island,” her dead lover whispered, faint words spit from the winds. “There is approaching danger in the air.”

She ran toward him. He was gone long before she reached the dunes. She hurried home and told her story. She feared she would be ridiculed. Instead, her parents threw their belongings into traveling bags and rode quickly away. During the night, a storm marched ashore and took away every house on the island, save one.

The girl’s home had been left untouched.

Only the Gray Man knew why, and nobody knows the Gray Man. He is simply part of the sand, the sea, the sky, and the mist from which he comes and goes. Storms follow. Storms never reach where he has touched.

Thelma Allen did not tempt fate or take any chances. The Gray Man had come to her doorway, and, two weeks later, so did Hurricane Hazel. It blistered the Grand Strand with raw power and fury. Homes were like matchsticks broken by the snap of the winds, and the isle was left with nothing to do but grieve, bury its dead, pick up the pieces, and build again.

Not all who left would return. Not all who left had anything waiting for them on the Strand. The storm took it all.

Well, not all, perhaps.

Thelma Allen said, “After the storm, we came back. It looked as though someone had taken a giant knife and sliced the beach in half. There had been thirty-one homes on the island. It spared two. One was mine.”

The Allens immediately saw that their steps and chimney had been washed away. But as they climbed back into the home, it dawned on them slowly that nothing had been disturbed. A vase of sea oats was still sitting untouched on the corner table.

A friend’s house sat eighteen feet away, and Thelma Allen recalled, “They never found enough of it to put into a bushel basket.”

The friend knew about the Gray Man. The friend had never seen the Gray Man. Thelma Allen had. He walked to her home and made no footprints on the sand when he left. Above her the sky had turned a pale shade of blue.

The sands were as white as the whitecaps on the waves. Even the Atlantic had become a ragged and ruffled concoction of indigo and green. A slender ray of sun topped the beach, and the golden tops of sea oats struggled to rise again from the dunes.

Thelma Allen looked for the gray.

She saw none.

The lone sentry of the Carolina coast had faded back into the mist, and the mist was lost at sea. She knew he would come again. He always did.

She thought about all of those around her who had suffered greatly and wondered why the Gray Man had stood in her doorway and no other.

And would he remember her when the deadly storms rose again?

Or would he leave her at the mercy of the winds.

The angry whitecaps of the Atlantic come crashing aboard the solitary beaches of the Carolinas.