were as gray as his face. He looked old and tired, and they waited for him to come closer. His face was a portrait of sadness, painted in a curious shade of gray. Jack Moore yelled out to him, but his words died in the winds.
The Gray Man walked into the mist. The Moores looked around them. They saw no one else on the beach. They were alone.
Clara Moore promptly walked back to her home and packed her bags. She and Jack were leaving the island as darkness crawled across the sands and curled among the dunes. Two weeks later, the fragile isles were pounded by the unbridled fury of Hurricane Hugo, a Category 4 storm responsible for seventy-six deaths and more than $10 billion in damages.
He doesn’t come often, Thelma Allen was told. But when he does, it’s for a reason. Lives hang in the balance.
Some say it’s a young man coming home from a long voyage at sea. Maybe so. They say he was in such a hurry to see the girl who would be his bride that the young man rode off the main road and cut across country in a spirited effort to find a shortcut home. Perhaps. His horse raced across the marshlands and into a bog of quicksand.
Both man and beast died in the quagmire.
After the funeral, the young girl who would have been his bride, a fair lady in mourning, was walking the surf line of the beach as the first shards of moonlight cut across the sands. In the salt spray, she saw a gray figure huddled against the dunes.
The face was so familiar. The eyes she would never forget. She heard his words but not his voice. “Get off the island,” her dead lover whispered, faint words spit from the winds. “There is approaching danger in the air.”
She ran toward him. He was gone long before she reached the dunes. She hurried home and told her story. She feared she would be ridiculed. Instead, her parents threw their belongings into traveling bags and rode quickly away. During the night, a storm marched ashore and took away every house on the island, save one.
The girl’s home had been left untouched.
Only the Gray Man knew why, and nobody knows the Gray Man. He is simply part of the sand, the sea, the sky, and the mist from which he comes and goes. Storms follow. Storms never reach where he has touched.
Thelma Allen did not tempt fate or take any chances. The Gray Man had come to her doorway, and, two weeks later, so did Hurricane Hazel. It blistered the Grand Strand with raw power and fury. Homes were like matchsticks broken by the snap of the winds, and the isle was left with nothing to do but grieve, bury its dead, pick up the pieces, and build again.
Not all who left would return. Not all who left had anything waiting for them on the Strand. The storm took it all.
Well, not all, perhaps.
Thelma Allen said, “After the storm, we came back. It looked as though someone had taken a giant knife and sliced the beach in half. There had been thirty-one homes on the island. It spared two. One was mine.”
The Allens immediately saw that their steps and chimney had been washed away. But as they climbed back into the home, it dawned on them slowly that nothing had been disturbed. A vase of sea oats was still sitting untouched on the corner table.
A friend’s house sat eighteen feet away, and Thelma Allen recalled, “They never found enough of it to put into a bushel basket.”
The friend knew about the Gray Man. The friend had never seen the Gray Man. Thelma Allen had. He walked to her home and made no footprints on the sand when he left. Above her the sky had turned a pale shade of blue.
The sands were as white as the whitecaps on the waves. Even the Atlantic had become a ragged and ruffled concoction of indigo and green. A slender ray of sun topped the beach, and the golden tops of sea oats struggled to rise again from the dunes.
Thelma Allen looked for the gray.
She saw none.
The lone sentry of the Carolina coast had faded back into the mist, and the mist was lost at sea. She knew he would come again. He always did.
She thought about all of those around her who had suffered greatly and wondered why the Gray Man had stood in her doorway and no other.
And would he remember her when the deadly storms rose again?
Or would he leave her at the mercy of the winds.
The angry whitecaps of the Atlantic come crashing aboard the solitary beaches of the Carolinas.
Attorney for Mister Drum
Somewhere on the outskirts of
Frankfort, Kentucky
Pop: 27,741
The Scene: A bright array of seasonal color focuses on the time of day as the often famous and sometimes notorious Floral Clock stands like an elegant centerpiece to Kentucky’s seat of government. The clock, comprised mostly of Joseph’s Coat and begonias, is not wedged into the hillside. It is suspended over a pool of water and occupies a planter that weighs a hundred short tons.
The Sights: The Floral Clock has become the face of the state capitol grounds, but it has had its share of ridicule. When Governor Bert Combs had the clock built in 1961, his political opponent, Happy Chandler, said, “Well, they don’t say it’s half past two in Frankfort anymore. They say it’s two petunias past the jimson weed.” The flowers are grown in a state-owned greenhouse near the capitol.
The design of the governor’s mansion, which occupies a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River, reflects an eclectic French neo-classicism style of architecture and was modeled after Marie Antoinette’s summer home “Petit Trianon” near Versailles. The mansion represents Kentucky’s idea of the post Civil War’s gilded age of “conspicuous consumption.” On the grand tour are the ballroom, reception room, formal salon, and state dining room.
The Setting: The Lindsey-Vest home, presently a state meeting house, is located on the historic “Corner of Celebrities,” an aristocratic neighborhood of Frankfort’s oldest homes – mostly Federal style and dating between 1800 and 1821. The house served as the residence of attorney George Graham Vest, who was defense counsel in one of the most remembered and celebrated trials ever held in a Kentucky courtroom.
The Story: George Graham Vest and adversity were no strangers to each other. They had met before and would meet again, but never in a trial like this one was destined to be. Vest had fought a few wars before, but now he was sitting in the dim light of a dark room and wondering how in God’s great name he would be able to save the reputation of his client.
It was a case unlike any he had ever witnessed before, the kind he might never see again. A client named Drum had placed his fragile and precarious reputation in the able hands of George Vest.
The attorney closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers. A dull ache kept boring into the back of his head. He knew
