New Voices 2020

“Beneath the Mercy of the Carolina Loblollies”

by Anna Hyatt Dad left my Mama when I was seventeen, and the swimming pool went to shit. With each week, each day that passed, its water turned a deeper shade of green, then amber, and the moss crept from the yard across the deck in soft patches, subsuming the sandstone tile which had once spread groomed and smooth, hot against bare running feet under the Carolina sunshine. Broken branches from the loblolly pines that towered around the deck’s edge lay untouched, tangled and knobby, in the pool’s raised flowerbeds—fruits of the rainstorms that washed through South Carolina that spring, unrelentingly, over and over again. In the wind, tall and skinny, they bended and straightened in unison, in slow motion, under the weight of the storm. Their florets clanged together at their tops, rustling and roaring, soft and powerful, small and huge. In the years that have passed, when I’ve come home, I’ve often laid in the soft grass of the front yard late at night and watched them move furiously across the purple skyline and considered how silly it is that we think we own anything at all beneath the mercy of the loblollies. But that spring, Mama would open her window upstairs and fall asleep to their roaring, alone now. And, in the morning, when all was still and silent, she would make her bed, sit on its corner, and watch the pool turn green, then amber, converting itself back to its natural state, turning into itself, under the gaze of her abandon from the window.

I’d power up her stairs to say goodbye, in a hurry, backpack strapped to my shoulders, and see her sitting there, watching, straight-backed. “I’m leaving, Mama, I’ll see you tonight.”

Moving between her and the window, I’d stand, still unnoticed. “Mama, I love you. I’m leaving.

I’ll see you tonight.”

She’d meet my eyes with a detached sort of smile, and say softly, “The pool looks like shit.”

This is a story about a pool. …

In 1989, my Dad worked as a banjo teacher for a grungy music store in a strip mall in downtown Spartanburg, a few miles from the home where he’d grown up with his parents, Bobby and Wanda, and his brother Steve. Steve had become a good man, a tall man, of six5