Piggott paused and gazed around him. He nodded toward the home of Frank Gaskill. The man could smell mullet coming long before they got here, Piggott said, and he could pole a skiff through the water without making a sound. Didn’t know Frank was on his way until he was already there and gone.
The old post office had served as a community store, which sold needles, thread, canned goods, cheese, salt pork, molasses, oil, and kerosene. With a good vegetable garden and a sea to fish, nobody on Portsmouth needed much of anything else. On every weekday afternoon, while waiting for Sunday, Henry Piggott wandered down to the dock and waited for the mail bags. Henry Piggott piled them in a wheelbarrow and rolled the letters and assorted packages back to Miss Dorothy Salter, unmarried and proud of it. She was postmistress. She sorted the envelopes, placed them neatly in pigeon holes, and by four o’clock the community had gathered on the front porch of the post office to pick up their mail. There was more gossip than letters to go around. Those were the good days, and those were good people. Henry Piggott had not forgotten a one of them and knew he would never see any of them again.
Even when a man was broke he had his memories.
Piggott laughed as he walked past the Styron-Keeler cemetery that held the grave of Sam Tolson. Good man. Hard working man. The inscription on his tombstone said it all: “Because of his striking resemblance to Booth, was arrested for the assassination of President Lincoln.”
Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong man.
John Wilkes Booth had pulled the trigger that fearful night in Ford’s Theater. Uncle Sam Tolson happened to be wandering free and loose on the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the night the army marched in with pictures and posters of the assassin. Soldiers were looking for suspects. Uncle Sam wore the same size shoe, the same size hat, and, in the splintered light just before sundown, he looked enough like the famous actor to start spouting lines of Shakespeare, even though it was doubtful that he had ever read anything written by the bard. He sat locked away in jail for days and might have died on the gallows, but community leaders of Portsmouth traveled to Elizabeth City with sworn statements and affidavits swearing that Sam Tolson wasn’t guilty of anything except, perhaps, straying too far from home.
Henry Piggot paused long enough to wave at Marian Gray Babb and Elma Dixon. They, too, had grown older. They, like Portsmouth itself, were changing with the passing of time. Couldn’t stop it. Might as well go with it.
“Not much else to do till Sunday,” Henry Piggott said.
“How about the mail?”
“Boats don’t come anymore.”
“How about the post office?”
“Closed.” He shrugged. “Only thing open for business around here is the burying ground,” he said.
“But you still ring the bells at the Methodist Church.”
“Have been for years.” Henry Piggott glanced over his shoulder. “The Good Lord sure did take a liking to that church,” he said.” Back a long time ago, even before I was born, the summer had been severe – dry and hot. Crops burned and withered in the fields. Then when it turned winter, the days were cold, and the waters of the sound were frozen. Nobody was fishing at all. The minister stood up in that pulpit, and he began to pray. He told the Good Lord, ‘If it is predestined that there be a wreck on the Atlantic Coast, please let it be Thy will that it happen here.’ A few days later, a ship loaded with flour was cast up on the sands by the sea, and the famine ended.”
“Divine Providence?”
“Don’t know. I wasn’t here.”
“So you keep on ringing the bells.”
“They sound real pretty, don’t they?”
“I guess the bells call the congregation to Sunday morning service.”
“There ain’t no Sunday morning service,” he said.
Henry Piggott paused.
“There ain’t no pastor.”
He paused again.
“There ain't no congregation,” he said.
The pause grew longer.
“There hasn’t been a service held in that church for going on twenty years.”
On a cold, blustery day in 1971, seventeen good men and four women braced themselves against the chilled winds - with the rain carving ice from the edge of pewter clouds - and gathered inside the church to hear those final words prayed over the casket of Henry Piggott.
He had been the last man in Portsmouth.
When the funeral procession sailed away, Marian Gray Babb and Elma Dixon boarded the boat and went with them. Portsmouth was empty and alone, a ghost town with more memories than ghosts. In the distance, the church bells were ringing.
Everyone smiled. Henry Piggott had rung them for the last time.
The old lighthouse protected ships from running aground on the shoals beyond Ocracoke Island.
The last rays of an afternoon sun reflect off fishing boats home from the sea.
(Photo: J Gerald Crawford)
The Gray Man
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Pawleys Island, South Carolina
Pop: 138
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
