Raysor Street, St. George, Dorchester County, South Carolina
A note before we begin. This dispatch is not mine. It came to the newspaper in an envelope with no return address, handwritten, nine pages, and I have typed it up as it was given to me, with the spelling fixed and nothing else. I have checked what I can check. The rest you’ll have to take the way I did. — Jackie
I. The Dare
You’ve seen the tower. Everybody has. It’s the tallest thing in St. George by a mile, white tank with the town name on it, standing on its legs over Raysor Street like it’s been waiting on somebody. From the top you can see the whole county. That’s what people say. I’m writing to tell you it’s true, and to tell you what else is up there, because I’m fifty-one years old now and I’ve carried it since I was seventeen, and your stories made me think there might be one person in the world who’d believe me.
You know the dare. Every kid in St. George knows it. You climb the tower at night and you come down and you’re not the same. Grown-ups say it to keep you off the ladder. Kids say it because it’s a dare, and a dare is a dare. What nobody says, because nobody who’s done it will talk, is what the dare actually means.
I did it in October of 1992 with a boy named Donnie. I’m not going to give his last name. You’ll see why.
II. The North Leg
We were seventeen. It was a Friday, after a ball game, and we’d been drinking something Donnie’s brother had left in a truck. Donnie was the one who said it. He was always the one who said it. He said, “I’ll go if you go,” and I said, “You go first then,” and he laughed and said, “Fine,” and that’s the last thing in my life that happened the way it was supposed to.
The ladder’s on the north leg. There’s a cage around it, or there was then. It’s a long climb. Longer than it looks from the street, and the street’s a long way down by the time you’re halfway, and the wind picks up above the trees in a way you don’t expect. Donnie went up ahead of me, fast, laughing, and I went up slow with my eyes on the rungs.
He got to the catwalk first. I heard him go quiet.
When I came up over the edge he was standing at the rail with his back to me and he wasn’t laughing anymore. He said, “Come look at this.”
I looked.
III. A Different Month
Here’s what you see from the top of the St. George water tower on an ordinary night. You see the town, which is small, and the lights of it, which are few. You see the highway going off toward Summerville and the dark where Four Holes Swamp is, and the glow of Harleyville, and if it’s clear, the far-off smear of Charleston on the bottom of the sky.
That’s not what we saw.
We saw the town, and it was wrong. Not strange. Wrong, the way a room is wrong when somebody’s moved one thing. The lights were in the right places, mostly. But there were more of them out toward the highway, where there was nothing then but a field, and there was a dark patch down on the south side where the old feed store should have been lit up, and the feed store had been lit up every night of my life.
And the air smelled like a different month.
Donnie said, “That’s not now.”
I said, “What?”
He pointed. “Look at the Lourie.” The theater sign was lit, and it hadn’t been lit in years. Then it was dark again, and lit, and dark, like a bulb going. He said, “It’s showing us something. It’s flipping through.”
I want to tell you I didn’t understand, but I did. Every kid who’s ever climbed it understands, standing up there with the wind coming through the rail. The tower doesn’t show you the county. It shows you the county in a year. Exactly a year. It settles on a night, and that night is three hundred and sixty-five days from the one you’re standing in, and you get to look as long as you can stand to.
IV. Three Lights
The flipping stopped. The town held still. October of 1993.
Donnie and I stood there a long time, not talking, finding our houses the way you do. Mine was on Memorial Avenue then, and the porch light was on, which meant my mother was waiting up, which meant I’d made it home that night a year from now and she was still waiting up for me. I remember feeling so relieved I nearly sat down.
Then Donnie said, “Where’s mine?”
He lived on the Grover road, right at the edge of what you could see. There was a line of houses out there, four of them, and from the tower you could always count them by their yard lights.
There were three.
He counted again. I counted. The second from the end was dark. Not dark like the lights were off. Dark like there was nothing there to light.
He said, “Maybe we moved.”
I said, “Maybe.”
He said, “Maybe Daddy finally sold it.” His daddy had been talking about selling for two years.
I said, “Probably that.”
We both knew. I don’t know how to tell you how we both knew, but we did. You can’t stand up there and not know. The tower doesn’t lie and it doesn’t explain. It just shows you.
Donnie looked at it a while longer. Then he turned around and said, “Well, I’m not the same, am I,” and laughed, and it was almost his laugh, and he went down the ladder first and I never saw him look at the tower again.
V. The Grover Road
Donnie died in June. A car, on the Grover road, a quarter mile from his house. I’m not going to say more than that. You can look it up if you want to, but I’d ask you not to.
His daddy sold the land that fall. The house was pulled down. When I went up the tower again, alone, in October of 1993, because I had to, there were three yard lights on the Grover road and the field by the highway had a gas station in it with its sign lit up, and the feed store was closed. Everything the tower had shown us was there. I stood and looked at it and I didn’t look for anything else and I came down.
That’s the dare. That’s what it means. Everybody who goes up comes down knowing one thing they weren’t supposed to know, and they spend the rest of their lives deciding what to do with it. Some of them leave town, which is why the tower has that reputation. Some of them stay and get quiet. I got quiet.
VI. What I Never Said
I never told anybody what we saw. Not his mother, who asked me once, years later, at the Piggly Wiggly, whether Donnie had seemed worried about anything that last year. I said no ma’am. He hadn’t. He’d been happy. He’d gone fishing more than he ever had and he’d taken his little sister to the fair twice and he’d been kind to his daddy, which he never was, and I think I was the only one who knew why.
I’ve thought about it every October since. Whether I should’ve said something. Whether, if I’d told him plain, Donnie, your house is gone next year and I think you are too, he’d have stayed off that road. Or whether he knew it better than I did and that’s why he went down the ladder laughing, and spent the year the way he spent it.
I’m fifty-one. I’ve got a boy of my own, and he’s sixteen, and this fall he’s started talking about the tower with his friends in that voice they use, the one that means it’s already decided.
I’m not going to stop him. I don’t think you can. But I’m going to tell him this, and it’s the only advice I’ve got:
When you get to the top, find your own house first. Then stop looking.
VII. The Ladder
That’s the letter. I checked the gas station, which opened in 1993, and the feed store, which closed that year, and the Lourie, which went dark for a long stretch and is lit again now. I didn’t check the rest. I don’t need to.
I have never climbed the tower. I’ve lived under it my whole life and never once put a hand on the ladder. I used to think that was because I was a sensible girl.
Now I think it’s because somebody in my family went up before me and came down and never said. And I’d rather not know which of us it was.
— Jackie
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