The Fifteen Seconds

Old White Meeting House, near Summerville, Dorchester County, South Carolina

Charleston calls it the Charleston earthquake, and Charleston can keep the name. The fault is ours.

It runs under Summerville, and on the last night of August in 1886, at nine fifty-one in the evening, it moved. It shoved the railroad fifteen feet sideways southeast of town and lifted the ground three feet, like a floor with something underneath it trying to stand up. Charleston lost its chimneys and its steeples. Dorchester County lost the Old White Meeting House, a church that had been standing since before the Revolution, and nobody took a picture of that because there was nobody left standing to hold a camera.

The shaking lasted forty-five seconds. Every account agrees on that.

But in Dorchester County the minute of nine fifty-one has sixty seconds in it, same as anywhere. The earthquake only used forty-five.

The other fifteen belong to the dead.

I. The Right Place

I had heard about the minute the way you hear about most things in this county, from somebody’s grandmother, at a kitchen table, with the understanding that you weren’t to repeat it. Every August thirty-first, at nine fifty-one in the evening, the clocks in the county stop. All of them. Wristwatches, kitchen clocks, the one on your phone, the one on the courthouse that’s been wrong since 1979 and for one minute a year is finally right. And in that minute, if you are standing in the right place, you can hear the people who were mid-sentence when the ground came up.

The right place is the ruins of the Old White Meeting House.

I went this year. I’m telling you that plainly. I parked on the road at half past nine and walked in through the gate with a flashlight I didn’t need, because the moon was up and the tabby walls were pale with it. There isn’t much left. Low walls, a few feet high. The outline of a room where people sat for two hundred years. Gravestones leaning in the grass, some older than the country.

I was not alone. I counted six other cars on the road and perhaps a dozen people inside the walls, standing apart from each other the way people stand in a waiting room. Nobody spoke. A woman near the east wall had a baby on her hip, asleep. An old man in overalls stood with his hat off. I recognized the pastor from Reevesville, which surprised me, and then it didn’t.

At nine fifty my watch said nine fifty. At nine fifty-one it said nine fifty-one.

Then it didn’t say anything.

II. Forty-Five Seconds

Here is what I can tell you about the forty-five seconds.

The ground did not move. I want to be clear. Nothing shook. But the sound came, the sound every account from 1886 tries to describe and fails: a roar from underneath, low, getting lower, like a freight train the size of the county passing beneath your feet. The tabby walls hummed with it. The baby woke and didn’t cry; she just opened her eyes and looked at the ground. The old man’s hat was shaking in his hand, and it was not the ground doing that.

Then, inside the roar, voices. Not many. Perhaps a dozen, perhaps twenty, overlapping, the way voices do in a room when something has just gone wrong. A man saying get the children, get the children in a voice that had not finished the sentence a hundred and forty years ago and was still trying. A woman laughing, a short surprised laugh, the kind you make when the floor tilts and you think for one second it’s a joke. Somebody praying, fast, the words run together. And somebody saying a name, over and over, and the name was the only thing in the world to him.

I couldn’t make the name out. It was worn down, the way a step gets worn in the middle. A hundred and forty Augusts of saying it.

Forty-five seconds of that. I counted. I counted because I’m Jackie Rhame and that is what I do when I’m afraid.

Then the roar stopped, the way it stopped in 1886, all at once, with the dust still in the air.

And the voices didn’t.

III. The Difference

This is the part nobody’s grandmother tells you, because you have to be there.

I understood it standing in the grass, before anyone explained it. The earthquake took forty-five seconds to kill them. It didn’t take any time at all to be over. Nobody told them. So the dead of the Old White Meeting House are not shouting anymore, because the thing that killed them has stopped, and they know it, and in the quiet that’s left, in the fifteen seconds that are theirs and not the earthquake’s, they talk.

Not to each other. To us.

The man who had been saying get the children said, very clearly, “Did they get out?” He was asking the woman with the baby. I watched her face. She looked at her daughter and then at the east wall and she said, “Yes. Yes, they did.” I have no idea if it was true. It didn’t matter. He said, “Thank you,” and he was gone from the minute.

The woman who had laughed said, “Is the church still here?” The old man in overalls put his hat back on and said, “Walls are. We come every year.” She said, “That’s enough,” and she was gone too.

The one who had been praying finished his prayer. I won’t tell you what he asked for. It was small and it was for somebody else and it was granted a long time ago, and he didn’t know, and now he does.

That left the one with the name. And I was the one standing nearest.

He said it one more time, slowly, as if he was trying to get it right for a stranger. And it was not worn smooth anymore. It was clear as the moon on the wall.

He said, “Jackie.”

Then he said, “If you see her. Tell her I was turned toward the door.”

I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who she was. I don’t know if a hundred and forty years of saying one name wears it down into whatever name the nearest living person is carrying, or if it was always that name, and I was always going to be the one standing there. I had the fifteen seconds to decide what to do about it and I used nine of them standing still.

Then I said, “She knows. She’s been told. She knows you were turned toward the door.”

He let out a breath he’d been holding since 1886, and he was gone, and my watch said nine fifty-two, and the moon was exactly where it had been.

IV. At the Gate

The pastor from Reevesville walked out with me. He didn’t say much, which is his way. At the gate he stopped.

“You heard the last one,” he said.

“He said my name.”

He nodded slowly, the way he does when something costs him. “He said mine, the first year I came. Said it plain.” He looked back at the walls. “I’ve never worked out if that’s a kindness or a trick. I come anyway. Somebody ought to be here to hear it, whichever it is. Same reason I drive to Reevesville.”

I asked him what he’d said back.

“Same as you, I expect.” He put his hands in his pockets. “You lie to the dead the way you’d lie to a child with a fever. It’s not the truth they need.”

V. The Fault Is Ours

I drove home down the old Charleston road, which the earthquake bent and the railroad straightened. Charleston can keep the name. The quake is in the books as Charleston’s, and the tourists stand under the earthquake bolts on the old houses downtown and pay somebody to tell them about it. That’s fine. Let them.

But the fault is ours. The dead are ours. And one minute a year, at a church that isn’t there anymore, they get fifteen seconds to ask whether it turned out all right, and somebody from Dorchester County stands in the grass and tells them yes.

I told a man I never met that the woman he loved knows he died facing her. I don’t know if that was mercy, or if I took the last thing he had that was his and spent it so I could go home. I’ve turned it over every night since.

Next August I’ll be at the east wall. If he’s still there, I’ll know I lied. If he isn’t, I’ll know I lied and it worked.

I’m not sure which I’m hoping for.

— Jackie