by Pat Conroy
Leaving the door open, I walked into Savannah’s bedroom and threw my suitcases on the bed. I turned on the lamp by the bed but the bulb was dead. In the darkness, I fumbled around for the wall switch and sent a cut-glass flower vase shattering to the floor, and then I heard a voice screaming at me from the hallway. “Halt! Don’t move, asshole. I’m a crack shot, this pistol is loaded, and I take pleasure in shooting criminals in cold blood.”
“It’s me, Eddie,” I shouted from the bedroom. “For godsakes, it’s me—Tom.”
“Tom?” Eddie Detreville said, puzzled. Then he began to scold. “Tom, you should never break into anyone’s apartment in New York without alerting me.”
“I didn’t break in, Eddie. I have a set of keys.”
“That doesn’t make you the Lone Ranger, sweetheart. Savannah gives out sets of her keys like they were party favors.”
“Why didn’t you call me about Savannah, Eddie?” I asked, thinking of the question for the first time.
“Now don’t you get cross with me, Tom. I’ll not have it. I have strict orders never to call her family about anything unless she dies. Don’t you think I wanted to? I was the one who found her. I heard her fall in the bathroom. She’d been gone for months. Months! I didn’t even know she was back. I thought she was being murdered by some criminal. I came trembling into this apartment with this loaded gun and found her bleeding on the bathroom floor. It was a total mess and I nearly passed out, as you can imagine. It makes me a nervous wreck just to think about it.”
“You were the one who found her? I didn’t know that.”
“It was a total mess. It took me days to clean up the blood. It was like an abattoir in there.”
“You saved her life,” I said to Eddie, who stood in the chiaroscuro of the dim light of the hallway.
“Yes. I, too, like thinking of it in those heroic terms.”
“You can quit pointing the pistol at me, Eddie,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Sorry, Tom,” he said, lowering the pistol. “I’ve been robbed twice this year.”
“Why don’t you lock your door?”
“My door’s got more locks than Shirley Temple’s hair, sweetheart. These men are acrobats and stuntmen. One leapt from a fire escape on the next building and landed on my air conditioner. I’ve greased all my windowsills with Crisco, but these are serious thieves. Serious. I won’t even tell you about my insurance premium. It’s astronomical. How are you, Tom? I haven’t even said hello properly.”
I walked to the doorway and embraced Eddie Detreville. He kissed me on the cheek and I returned the kiss, before we walked into the living room. He turned on a lamp and I fell heavily into a soft armchair. The light hurt my eyes and entered my brain with a cruel, stunning voltage.
“Where’s Andrew?” I asked with my eyes shut.
“He left me for a younger man, Tom. Called me an old fag. An old, worn-out fag. It wasn’t very pleasant. But he calls every once in a while and it looks like we might be friends again. Savannah was an angel when it happened. I practically lived over here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, opening my eyes. The light felt as if someone had tossed a tumbler of acid at my retinas. “I liked Andrew. You two were good together. Any other nice boy on the horizon?”
“Ha! Not a one. Unless I can tempt you to cross the line while you’re here. Or are you still holding to the ridiculous claim that you’re a hopeless hetero?”
“I’ve become a neuter,” I said. “I’m not into sex anymore. I’m into wallowing self-pity.”
“Let me make you a drink,” he said. “Then I’ll begin the slow sensual seduction.”
“Make it light, Eddie. The migraine cometh.”
“Did you see Savannah?”
“Yeah. It was like talking to a fern.”
“She was so out of control for a while. You have no idea. Cuckoo nest time.”
“Do you have any pain pills? I left mine back home.”
“Pills?” he answered. “I’ve got uppers, downers, middlers, and in-betweeners. You name it and Dr. Eddie’s got it. My medicine cabinet looks like a branch of Bristol-Myers. But it’s not good to drink and pill at the same time.”
“Since when have I done what’s good for me?”
“You look terrible, Tom. I’ve never seen you look so dreadful. You’re hardly even cute anymore.”
“Is this how you begin a slow sensual seduction?” I asked, smiling at him. “No wonder you’re alone.”
“I didn’t mean it critically,” he said, pouring a drink at the bar beside Savannah’s desk. “Yeeesh. Mr. Sensitive. By the way, you didn’t tell me how you thought I looked.”
He brought me a cognac. I watched him as he crossed the room. Eddie Detreville was elegant, refined, and middle-aged. His sideburns were silver and there were splinters of gray visible in his immaculately combed brown hair. He had the face of a tired king. His skin was soft and slightly exhausted around the mouth and eyes. The whites of his eyes were threaded with red veins. There was a slight yellowing there, as though he were watching you through discolored linen.
“I’ve told you before, Eddie, and I’ll tell you again. You’re one of the finest-looking men on the planet.”
“You’re just saying that because I fished so shamelessly for a compliment. Well, I don’t apologize.”
“You look good enough to eat,” I said.
“Well, well, perhaps we can work something out.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, Eddie,” I said.
“Promises, promises. But you really think I look good? I haven’t aged that much, have I?”
“You ask me that every time I see you, Eddie.”
“It’s important every time I see you. Since you only see me rarely, you’re in a perfect position to judge my deterioration. I came across some old pictures of myself the other day, Tom, and I just wept. I was beautiful. Perfectly beautiful when I was a young man. I never turn the lights on in the bathroom when I shave now. I can’t bear to study my face in the mirror. It’s just too sad. I’ve started cruising the bars again, Tom. I approached a young man the other night. A lovely child. I wanted to buy him a drink. He said to me, ‘Are you shitting me, gramps?’ I was perfectly stunned.”
“His loss, Eddie,” I said.
“I fear getting old far more than I fear dying. But enough about me. How long do you plan to be in New York this time, Tom?”
“I don’t know, Eddie. Savannah’s shrink wants me to tell her all the shitty stories about my family so she can put Humpty Dumpty together again. I’d like to just tell her that Mom’s wacko, Dad’s wacko, all Wingos are wacko, ergo, Savannah is wacko.”
“When’s the last time you talked to Savannah or heard from her, Tom?”
“It’s been over three years,” I said, embarrassed by the length of time. “She says that I remind her too much of Luke.”
“Tom, I want to tell you something. I don’t think Savannah’s going to come out of it this time. I think it’s gotten to be too much for her. I think it’s exhausted her. She’s just tired of fighting it.”
“Don’t say that, Eddie. Say anything else you want to, but I never want to hear you say that again.”
“I’m sorry, Tom. It’s just something I’ve felt for a long time.”
“Feel it, Eddie. Please don’t say it.”
“It was stupid of me. I recant every syllable. Let me fix you dinner tomorrow night.”
“I’d like that very much. See how I feel in the morning.”
After Eddie left, I surveyed the apartment and waited for the migraine to move across my brain like the great shadow of a lunar eclipse. It was still two hours away, but I could feel the high-pressure area building at the base of my skull. Not until it reached the left temple would it bring me to my knees. I took the first pain pill and washed it down with the last swallow of cognac. My eye rested on the photograph Savannah had placed on the wall above her desk. My father had taken it on the deck of his shrimp boat at the beginning of o
ur senior year in high school. Luke and I are smiling at the camera and both of us have our arms draped around Savannah’s shoulders. Savannah is laughing and staring up at Luke with pure, uncomplicated affection. The three of us are tanned, young, and, yes, beautiful. Behind us, past the dock and the marsh, small and barely visible, my mother is waving at my father in front of our small white house. If any of us knew what that year would bring, we would not have been smiling. But the photograph stopped time, and those three smiling Wingo children would stand on that boat forever holding one another close in a bond of frail but imperishable love.
I took out my wallet from my back pocket and extracted the folded, crumbling letter Savannah had written to me after I had coached my first football game. I stared at the laughing girl in the picture and wondered when it was, the exact moment, that I had lost her, that I let her fall too far away from me, that I betrayed the laughing girl and let the world have her. The photograph cut into my heart and I began to read the letter aloud.
Dear Coach,
I was thinking about what you can teach your boys, Tom. What language you can use for the love of boys driven by your voice across the grass you mowed yourself. When I saw you and your team win the first game, all the magic of sport came to me silver voiced, like whistles. There are no words to describe how beautiful you looked delivering urgent messages to quarterbacks, signaling for time-outs, pacing the green, unnaturally lit sidelines, loved by your sister for your unimaginable love of play, for the soft gauzy immensity of your love for all the boys and all the games of the world.
But there are some things only sisters can teach the coaches in their lives. Teach them this, Tom, and teach them very well: Teach them the quiet verbs of kindness, to live beyond themselves. Urge them toward excellence, drive them toward gentleness, pull them deep into yourself, pull them upward toward manhood, but softly like an angel arranging clouds. Let your spirit move through them softly, as your spirit moves through me.
I cried last night when I heard your voice above the crowd. I heard you cheering for the clumsy tackle, the slow-footed back, music of your sweet . praise. But Tom, my brother, the lion, all golden and hurt: Teach them what you know the best. There is no poem and no letter that can pass your one ineffable gift to boys. I want them to take from you the knowledge of how to be the gentlest, the most perfect brother. Savannah
When I finished reading the letter, I gazed at the photograph again, then carefully replaced the letter in my wallet.
In the bedroom, I replaced the bulb in the lamp on her bedside table and cleaned up the glass shards of the broken vase. I undressed quickly and threw my clothes on the chair beside the bed. I pulled the covers back and climbed into bed. I closed my eyes, then opened them.
And then the pain summoned me. It came like a pillar of fire behind my eyes. It struck suddenly and hard.
In the perfect stillness, I shut my eyes and lay in the darkness and made a vow to change my life.
4
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family’s history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.
Let us begin with a single fact: The island dogs are calling to each other.
It is night. My grandfather listens to them and does not like the sound. In that melody of hounds all the elegiac loneliness of my part of the world is contained. The island dogs are afraid. It is October 4, 1944, ten o’clock in the evening. The tide is rising and will not be full until 1:49 the next morning.
My sister is born in the white house by the river. My mother is not due for a month, but that is of small import now. Sarah Jenkins, eighty-five, black, and a midwife for sixty years, is bent over my mother as Savannah is born. Dr. Bannister, Colleton’s only doctor, is dying in Charleston at this very moment.
Sarah Jenkins is tending to Savannah when she notices my head making its unexpected appearance. I came as a surprise, an afterthought.
There is a hurricane moving toward Melrose Island. My grandfather is strengthening the windowpanes with masking tape. He goes over and stares down into the cradle at Luke, who is sleeping. He listens again to the medley of dogs but he can barely hear them now because of the wind. The power went out over an hour before and I am delivered into the world by candlelight.
Sarah Jenkins cleans us thoroughly and attends to our mother. It has been a messy, difficult birth, and she fears there might be complications. She was born a slave in a hut behind the Barnwell Plantation and is the last surviving slave in Colleton County. Her face is leathery and shining; her color is café au lait.
“Ah, Sarah,” my grandfather said, holding Savannah up to the lantern light. “A good sign. This is the first girl-child born to the Wingos in three generations.”
“The mama not doin’ good.”
“Can you help her?”
“All I can. You know that. She needs doctor now.”
“The wind’s picking up, Sarah.”
“Just like it did in the storm of ninety-three. Now that was a wicked storm. Kill all kinds of poor folks.”
“You aren’t afraid?”
“Gotta die of somethin’,” she said.
“It was good of you to come, Sarah.”
“I like bein’ with my daughters when their time comes. Black or white, it no matter. They all my daughters then. I got a thousand children walkin’ around these islands.”
“Do you remember delivering me?” my grandfather asked.
“You was a squallin’ child.”
“Twins,” my grandfather said. “What does that mean?”
“Good luck,” the black woman said, returning to my mother. “God smiling twice as hard at a troubled world.”
In the forest outside the house, the wind began to bear down hard on the trees and the rains gouged the earth with powerful newborn hands. Waves began to crash over the dock. Snakes began to leave their burrows and take to the high branches of trees, sensing flood. A small uprooted palmetto tumbled down the road leading up to the house like a man rolling. No birds sang on the island. Even the insects had battened down.
My grandfather went into the bedroom and found my mother nearly asleep, exhausted, with Sarah Jenkins wiping her face with a cloth.
“You did good, Lila darling. A fine night’s work.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she answered. “The storm?”
“It don’t look like much,” he lied. “You just get some sleep and let me worry about the storm.” He walked back into the living room. From his hip pocket, he withdrew a telegram that my mother had received from the War Department two days before. My father had been shot down during an air raid over Germany and was missing in action. He was presumed dead. He wept bitterly for his son, but then remembered he had his duties and that twins were a sign of luck.
He walked to the kitchen and began to fix a pot of coffee for himself and Sarah. When the coffee was ready, he took a cup to the black woman. Then he felt the wind shouldering against the house and the low-humming of the windows, a song of endangered glass. The water had risen almost to the level of the dock and the tide was still pushing inland, wind-urged and virulent. An osprey’s nest torn from the top of a dead tree whipped across the yard like a woman’s hat. The river carried it swiftly upstream.
My grandfather took the white Bible he had given my parents as a gift for their wedding and opened it to the glossy pages between the Old Testament and the New. My mother had chosen two names, one for a boy, one for a girl. He took a fountain pen and beneath Luke’s name wrote down the name Savannah Constance Wingo. Below that he inscribed my name: Thomas Catlett Wingo.
The storm would be called Bathsheba by the black people of the lowcountry, and she would kill two hundred seventeen people along the South Carolina coast.
My grandfather checked his watch. It was almost eleven. He opened to the book of Job and read for an hour. He thought about his son and his wife. My grandmother had left him during the Depression. In his heart, there were times when my grandfather was bitter with the Lord. He read about Job and was comforted. Then he wept again for his only son.
He rose and stared out at the river. There was an otherworldly light, an eerie brightening that had accompanied the storm, but he could not see the river now. He put on his boots, his rain slicker and hat. He took one of the lanterns from the kitchen, checked my mother and Sarah again, and each one of the babies. Then he went out into the storm.
The door almost blew off its hinges when he opened it. It took all his strength to close it. He leaned into the wind and staggered through the yard toward the river. A twig hit his forehead, cutting it like a blade. He shielded his eyes with his hand and listened to the sound of trees breaking in half along the river. When he was twenty-five yards away from the river, he stepped into water up to his knees. Alarmed, blinded by the rain, he knelt down and tasted the water. It was salt.
He prayed to the God of Abraham, to the God who parted the Red Sea, to the God who destroyed the whole world with water; he prayed for strength.
He let the wind carry him back to the house. When he reached the front door he could not open it; the wind had sealed it shut. He ran toward the back door and was knocked to the ground by a limb torn from the oak by my parents’ bedroom window. He rose up, dizzy and bleeding from a wound on the back of his head, and crawled on his hands and knees to the back door. The storm felt like a mountain leaning against him. He opened the back door and water poured into the kitchen. For a moment he lay stunned on the kitchen floor. But the waters were rising. He washed the blood from his head in the sink. He moved in the inhuman light of the lantern toward my mother’s bedroom. His shadow, huge and portentous, followed him.
Sarah Jenkins was asleep in a chair by my mother’s bed. He shook her gently awake.
“The river,” he whispered. “It’s up, Sarah.”