Guest Writer: G. Hamlin O’Kelley III

Beaufort, South Carolina. The second-oldest town in the state. I'm a native. One of the few left.

Back over the Easter weekend of 1989, I was home in that terrestrial heaven on earth.

Technically, I didn't live in my hometown full time. I went away for high school. No, I didn't do anything wrong. No, it wasn't a punishment. In fact, my time away remains my formative educational experience on a hill thirty minutes north of Boston. But, in 1989, I was in my hometown for Spring Break. Easter fell on March 26th that year. My spring break overlapped with Easter, one of the rare years that it did.

That year, we were scheduled to go to a cousin's wedding in North Carolina. We were going to leave on Good Friday, spend Saturday at the wedding, and have Easter brunch at my aunt and uncle's house the next day. I was not excited about it. Why would I want to leave Beaufort?

At seventeen, Beaufort, South Carolina, embodied a Bosch painting: a garden of earthly delights. We could drive. We had access to the river. We had boats at our disposal. We had cars. We knew which stores would sell us beer. We smoked cigs and weed. We shopped in other aisles of the pharmacy, too. Most girls were on the pill. Most boys took full advantage of that fact.

Small towns hold so much charm, as all ages and stages are friends and family and family of friends. We had a glut of all.

On the morning of the 24th, I lay up sorry in my bed as my father and mother scurried around downstairs, getting us ready to head to North Carolina. Commands yelled up the staircase bounced off wallpaper and paint into my room. "Get up! We are leaving at 11!" My head hurt from too many Marlboro Lights and Lite Beer from Miller, consumed at the end of a dirt road out on Coosaw Island. My pals who stayed at home for high school were off on Good Friday, so the clarion call for a Coosaw party buzzed across landlines in the 524, 522, and 838 phone exchanges. We had celebrated a friend's birthday on the 23rd.

That morning, my brothers and I packed our bags. We loaded the car. My father had to go to his office for something.

And, then, at 10:45, the phone rang.

That mother fucking phone

That mother fucking phone in the library between the den and my parents' bedroom. That mother fucking phone on the wall in the kitchen. That mother fucking phone upstairs in the hallway that we jokingly called the Children's Line, even though we didn't have one.

Passing through the kitchen, I picked up and answered, "Hello." Being seventeen and hungover, I continued, "O'Kelley residence. Hamlin speaking."

There was a catch on the other end of the line. "Hello?" I questioned.

Immediately, I recognized the voice. It was Jeanne Aimar, our former across-the-street neighbor. We had lived across from the Aimars from the time I was eight months old until I was fifteen. A good run, indeed. Not being able to say Aimar, I called Mrs. Aimar "Memar" and her husband "Dr. Memar."

"Hey, daahhlin, it's Memah." She had a great old Beaufort accent that's all but died out. A catch in her voice. A quiet pause. "Your mama theah?"

"Yes, ma'am. One minute."

"MOM!!!!" I yelled to the back of the house. "IT'S MEE-MAAAR!" I'm sure I busted out Memar's eardrum screaming like that.

"She's coming, Memar," I said into the mother fucking receiver.

"Thank ya, daaahlin," came the reply. Another catch. Another pause. "Love you, Hambone."

My reply: "Love you, too, Memar. Here's Mom."

My mother had appeared in the kitchen in her blouse and slip. That was a common sight in the 1980s in my hometown. Mothers often came home and ditched their outer clothes, leaving on their slips and throwing on a housecoat. My mother did it all the time. A friend's mother was so famous for donning a housecoat the moment she walked in the door that we all thought she might be an invalid in the manner of a Victorian child pushed into the sunshine in a wicker rolling chair to take the air.

Looking at me questioningly to ask what was going on, I shrugged and handed her the receiver. "Hey theah," my mother responded.

Quiet. A catch. A pause.

Then an animal sound I've only heard one other time in my life. I pray none of you ever hear it. All because I answered the mother fucking phone

A guttural growl of agony.

A "no" like I've never heard before or since.

My brothers came running.

We stood in the kitchen waiting, knowing nothing good came out of that mother fucking phone receiver from one of our all-time favorite people.

I could hear sobs on the other end, too.

Charlie Brown's teacher's messages came through more clearly than Memar's tones that day.

Then, from our mother: "Thank you for calling. If you can, tell Dr. Aimar to tell them I'm on the way. We love you, too." All said through a gruesome mask of contorted pain and, later, what we would learn would be nascent grief.

My mother hung up the mother fucking receiver.

She looked at us and said, "Boys, Reynolds has been shot. He's at the hospital, and it's not good. That's all Memar knew. I'm going to the hospital right now."

Reynolds was my youngest brother's best friend.

My mother ran to get her keys and headed out the door. My middle brother screamed at her, "Mom, your slip!"

Not one to let out a good g.d., she screamed, "Judas Priest!" She hurried back inside, threw on a skirt, and started to hightail it to the hospital.

She had forgotten her keys.

"Mom, your keys!"

I ran them out to her.

Coming back into the house, I slammed my right hand in the door. The big mahogany front door my parents purchased from a furniture salvage place near the old Talmadge Bridge in Savannah. What did it matter about my swelling hand?

Reynolds had been shot

The details hardly matter now, but our pal Reynolds died that day from a gunshot wound.

He was thirteen

Almost immediately after slamming my hand in the door, the mother fucking phone rang.

My father called and said he'd be right home.

"Dad, how's Reynolds?" I asked.

"He's gone, Son," he said.

Silence on the mother fucking phone

Then, me asking, "We're not going to a wedding, are we?"

"No, Son," came his reply. "I'll be there shortly."

I stood in our kitchen listening to my brothers crying and calling a friend or two on the mother fucking phone. I heard people calling us. Friends of mine. Friends of my parents. Calls were made. Discussions were had. Agreements to go over to Reynolds' family's house. All on that mother fucking phone.

Some moments remain etched in our minds. Engraved with acid on copper plates. Never to change, only to fade each time the ink smears the paper with copper blurring around the edges.

That height-of-spring day, we were the Chamber of Commerce's ideal. But for the gnats, everyone would have wanted to have been in Beaufort that day. The azaleas burst in our backyard. I've always hated azaleas for their eleven months of boredom and only a few short days of bloom. That day I cursed those purple formosas. It being pollen season, I watched a swirl of yellow billow over the tidal creek on which we lived. Some wisteria volunteered in a pine tree in our neighbor's yard, and I watched it sway in the breeze as the tide turned. The flowering quince my father rooted from my grandmother—who had rooted it from her grandmother in Virginia—had a few pink blooms left on it, poking through its thorns. A few of the daffodils we had planted by the place where we had a hammock were about over and were fading into the yard. The yard's Charleston grass greened its way back to health. A bridal wreath spirea whited its blooms in a corner of the yard, hiding a compost pile. With the incoming tide, the palm fronds of our palmetto trees made that crinkly sound only they make in the wind. The Spanish moss swayed off the oak trees.

And the mother fucking phone kept ringing.

*Hamlin O’Kelley practices law in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.  A proud graduate of Phillips Academy, the University of North Carolina, and the University of South Carolina School of Law, he would rather be writing full time.

IG: hamlinokelley