by Pat Conroy
“Why are you so surprised?” she asked.
“Because he didn’t grow up in Bear Bryant’s household, did he?” I said.
“Who is Bear Bryant?” she asked.
“This is a joke, isn’t it, Lowenstein?” I said in amazement. “You’re setting me up for something. No, I apologize. Where I come from, not knowing Bear Bryant would be like your husband not knowing Yehudi Menuhin. He’s a football coach.”
“What is a line of scrimmage?” she asked.
“Why on earth would you want to know, Susan?”
“Because Bernard thinks I’m the village idiot when I try to talk to him about his new interest in football,” she said. “Bernard talks about nothing but football now, about strange things like flare-out patterns, power plays, screen passes, buttonhooks. It’s as if he’s suddenly gone to some foreign country.”
“You’re getting the lingo down good, Doctor,” I said.
“Is it necessary for him to lift weights, Tom?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s all part of the discipline, Susan.”
“How do you find Bernard, Tom; and I’d like an honest answer,” she said. Her voice was raw and edgy.
“How honest?”
“As honest as you can be without making me angry with you,” she said, and I thought she was going to smile, but she did not.
“He’s a nice boy, Susan,” I said.
“A little more honest than that, Tom,” she said. “Surely you know I’m tougher than that.”
“He’s unhappy, Susan,” I said, her face in shadow now. “He seems miserably unhappy for reasons unknown to me. His misery touches me in some way, perhaps because it matches mine, perhaps because I can see a way out of it for Bernard where I can see no escape for me at all.”
“He told me what you said to him the first day,” she said. “I was furious with you, Tom. He told me that you made him cry twice.”
“He was disrespectful,” I said. “I don’t know how to coach a boy who doesn’t show me simple decency. I demanded that he be courteous. It won’t cause permanent damage, I promise.”
“He was in therapy for three years, Tom,” she said in a whisper.
“It didn’t quite work, Doctor,” I said. “Something is wrong. Bernard’s got neglect written all over him. He’s never been approved of in his whole life. It hurts him to breathe sometimes.”
“I know,” she said. “I thought it might do him some good to go off to school. I thought it might give him a chance to make some friends. Do you know that he’s never spent the night away from home with a friend? He’s been a difficult child since the day he was born. He was never cuddly and sweet like other babies I saw in the park. There’s something in Bernard that I’ve never touched in my whole life. Some lonely place.”
“Does the loneliness come from you or from Herbert?” I asked.
“The loneliness comes from me,” she said.
“Football is a game where you can’t feel lonely,” I said. “Maybe that’s why Bernard is attracted to it. I know you’re upset about his playing football, but it touches a chord of beauty in your son. And it’s his game alone. He chose it without the consent of his parents. When I tell you that I think Bernard’s unhappy I’m not lying to you. But the kid is happier than a pig in shit when I’m running him through drills or sending him out for long passes.”
“Tom,” she said, “I’ve never watched a football game in my whole life.”
“You haven’t missed a fucking thing, Lowenstein,” I said.
“And I never plan to see one in the future,” she added.
“You want to bet?” I said. “I bet you and Herb go up to Phillips Exeter to watch Bernard play next year.”
She groaned loudly and said, “Will this be before my divorce or after?”
I reached down and took her purse from the bookcase behind her desk and set it in the middle of the room. Motioning for Susan to rise, I placed her on one side of the purse and I lined up directly opposite.
“All right, Susan,” I said, pointing to the purse and going down into a three-point stance. “This purse is the football. You’re the defensive team and I’m the offensive team. I’m trying to take this football and put it inside your goal line behind you. You are trying to stop me. Your team always has to line up on that side of the ball until the ball is moved by my team. My team always has to line up on this side of the ball until the ball is snapped.”
“Tom, this is unbearably tedious,” she said, but she was laughing.
“Don’t interrupt the coach again, Lowenstein,” I said, “or you’ll be running laps around the reservoir in Central Park. Wherever the ball is on the field is known as the line of scrimmage. Do you understand?”
“I didn’t understand a single thing you said,” she replied.
“Lowenstein, it’s un-American not to know what a line of scrimmage is,” I said.
“Maybe your coaching is a little rusty,” she said.
“It might be,” I said, “but there are still some things I know. Watch Bernard’s eyes tomorrow night after the big surprise.”
“What’s the surprise?” she asked.
“It’s a holy night to any athlete,” I said. “Tomorrow night I issue uniforms to the boys who’ve made the team. Bernard’s made the varsity. Do you want me to bring you a book explaining a little about football, Susan?”
“Please don’t,” she said, stepping toward me as I rose. She touched me lightly on the arm.
“Offsides,” I said, and I felt a desire stir in me like some nearly extinct beast shaking off the effects of a long and troubled hibernation.
13
My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father for making my childhood a long march of terror. Larceny is not a difficult crime to condone unless your childhood was the item stolen. Without equivocation, I will tell you he was a terrible and destructive father. Yet it will always remain one of life’s most ineluctable mysteries that I would one day come to feel an abiding compassion for the man and a frayed, nervous love. His fists were the argosies of his rule and empowerment. But his eyes were the eyes of my father, and something in those eyes always loved me even when his hands could not. He brought no natural talent to the dilemma of loving his family properly. He had developed none of the soft gifts of fatherhood. We mistook his love songs for battle hymns. His attempts at reconciliation were mistaken for brief and insincere cease-fires in a ferocious war of attrition. He lacked all finesse and tenderness; he had mined all harbors, all approaches to his heart. Only when the world brought him to his knees could I reach up and touch my father’s face without him bloodying mine. By the time I was eighteen I knew everything there was to know about a police state, and it was only when I left his house that the long state of siege was ended.
When my first child, Jennifer, was born, Savannah flew down from New York to help Sallie when she came home from the hospital. We toasted Jennifer’s health with cognac, and Savannah asked me in a voice tinged with an ineffable sadness, “Do you love Dad, Tom?”
It took me several moments to reply and then I said, “Yes. I do. I do love the asshole. Do you love him, Savannah?”
She also took her time in answering, then said, “Yes, Tom. It’s the strangest thing. I love him, too, and I don’t have the vaguest idea why.”
“Maybe it’s brain damage,” I suggested.
“Maybe it’s just the realization that he couldn’t help who he was. By loving him, we’re just being who we are and we can’t help it either,” she said.
“Naw, I just think it’s brain damage,” I said.
A large, florid man, Henry Wingo seemed to fill up every room he entered with a superabundance of energy. He considered himself a self-made man and the salt of the good southern earth. He lacked all those incommunicable, limpid depths that introspection might provide. Recklessly, he came at the world full throttle, manic and exuberant, leaning into the almost unbreachable gales whipped up in the turbu
lence of his passage. He was more a force of nature than he ever was a father and there were always hurricane warnings registering on the Beaufort scale when he entered the home of my childhood.
But because there was no established system to calibrate my own secret hatred of the man, I learned the strategies of silence and truancy. I took lessons from my mother in rearguard actions and learned the deadly art of the sniper by examining my father privately with the insurrect, unforgiving eyes of a damaged child. I studied him through the cross hairs of a telescopic sight I leveled at his heart. What I know of human love I took first from my parents; with them, love was a deprivation and a withering. My childhood was one of disorder, peril, and small craft warnings.
Failure seemed only to stimulate my father. My sister called it “the Sadim touch.” When she coined the phrase, I don’t remember, but it must have been in high school, when she cheerfully embraced profanity as a way to make her opinions and ideas understood more clearly. When shrimping season was over each fall, Dad turned his full attention to other, more creative, ways to earn his family’s bread. His brain teemed with unworkable projects to make fast, easy money. Plans, blueprints, and schemes leaked out of him in incessant floods and he promised all his children we would be millionaires when we left high school. He grounded his whole life on the premise that his ideas, brilliant and unconventional, would lead all of us to unimaginable riches and honor. He also brought a gift to American enterprise shared by very few others: He never learned a single thing from his mistakes. Each failure, and there were dozens of them, only served to convince him that his time was approaching and that his apprenticeship in the harsh milieu of commerce was nearing its end. All he lacked was luck, he told us again and again.
But behind the wheel of his shrimp boat, with the dawn spilling its fine oils across the waters and the winches groaning beneath the weight of the nets, my father was the perfect master of his environment. His time on the river had left its mark and he would always look ten years older than his actual age. Each year his wind-tortured face would sag a bit around the edges and the Carolina sun at nigh noon would loosen and flense the pouches beneath the eyes. His skin was hard and leathery and it looked as though you could strike a kitchen match on the stubble of his chin. His hands were rough and his palms were glazed with layers of calluses the color of vellum. He was a hard-working and respected shrimper, but his talents were not amphibious; they did not follow him up onto dry land. Very early on, my father became obsessed with getting off the river. Shrimping was always a “temporary” situation with him. Neither of my parents could ever admit that shrimping was a beautiful way of life. They kept aloof from the shrimping fraternity and cut themselves off from any of those natural alliances so common among peers. Of course, the shrimpers and their wives were far too common for my mother’s speciously cultivated and unattenuated tastes. My parents had no close friends. Together, they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny. It was an article of faith to Henry Wingo that he was a businessman of genius. Never has a man’s basic assumption about himself been so heartbreakingly wrong or caused him or his family so much prolonged and unnecessary grief.
When my father was away from the river, he could take marvelous ideas and execute them disastrously, with seemingly little effort on his part. Some of his schemes could have worked, almost everyone admitted that: He invented and built machines to head shrimp, to clean crabs, to eviscerate fish, and all of them worked a little bit. There were no complete failures nor any resounding successes, just a lot of funny-looking machines cluttering up the small workshop he built behind the house.
And yet it was on the river that my father’s most fabulous and misconceived ideas were spun out in an endless free association of language as he guided his boat through the shallow channels in morning darkness. He would sit behind the wheel, listening to the hum of the diesel, steering through the unmarked channels that led to the main river. The marsh was a huge but invisible presence, and he would conduct long monologues in the gloomy alcove of the wheel house in that sweet time of morning before the birds awoke with the sun coming up out of the Atlantic. Rare among shrimpers, he took his three children with him as often as he could wrest control of us from our mother, and I think he took us to cut the edge of the solitude of the shrimper’s life.
On summer mornings, in the starry darkness, my father would wake us gently and we would dress soundlessly and leave the house with our footfalls printed softly in the dewy yard. In the back of the pickup, we would listen to the early-morning radio as our father moved down the dirt road that led to the wooden bridge on the opposite side of the island. We breathed in the marsh air as the disc jockey issued the weather report and told of small-craft warnings from Cape Hatteras to Saint Augustine, gave the wind direction and its speed, and told all shrimpers for a hundred miles the exact figures they would need to know. Each morning I felt that infusion of strength granted to the early riser as my father drove the five miles to the shrimp docks. Lester Whitehead, the striker who had worked for my father for fifteen years, would be filling the hold with five hundred pounds of ice as my father’s truck pulled into sight. The nets hung from the uplifted outriggers like dark chasubles. Walking down the long gangway from the parking lot to the dock, we could smell diesel fuel, coffee brewing in the galleys, and the overpowering aroma of fresh seafood. We passed the giant scales silvering beneath the cheap light where the black women who could head shrimp faster than the eye could see would be awaiting us when we returned with the day’s catch. That sharp perfume of fresh fish and shrimp always made the walk to the boat seem as if I were under water, breathing immaculate salt tides through the pores of my skin. As the children of a shrimper, we were just one more form of marine life in the lowcountry.
When my father gave the word and we heard the engine burst into sudden life, we would untie the boat and leap aboard as he headed out toward the sounds and channels of our island-dappled watery realm. On our right we would pass the sleeping town of Colleton, the mansions and stores along the Street of Tides, and my father would sound the horn to signal the bridge tender to open the bridge for the lordly passage of the Miss Lila on its way out to sea. My father’s boat was a fifty-eight-foot beauty with an incredibly shallow draft for such a large boat. He made his three children memorize at an early age the essential numbers of his boat before he would confer official status on us as members of the crew. Shrimping always involves a tireless worship of numerology and when shrimpers discuss their boats they toss arcane figures back and forth that define the capabilities of their respective crafts. My father’s main engine was a 6-DAMR-844 Buda manufactured by the Allis-Chalmers Company, Boston. It developed 188 horsepower at 2100 rpm. His reduction gear was a 3.88:1 Capitol. The brass shaft turned a 44-by-36-inch four-blade Federal propeller. The main bilge pump was a 1¼-inch Jabsco. In the deckhouse was a 42-inch Marty’s wheel, a Ritchie compass, a Marmac throttle and clutch controls, and a Metal Marine automatic pilot. There was a Bendix DR16 depth recorder and a Pearce Simpson Atlantic 70 radio. On deck, the Miss Lila carried a Stroudsburg 515½ T-hoist, Wickwire cable, and Wall Manila rope. The anchor was a 65-pound Danforth and the horn was a 32-volt Spartan. In the language of shrimpers there were other brand names that imparted specific information: Oil City Brass blocks, Surrette Marine batteries, Dodge pillow blocks, Timken bearings, and a hundred others. Like all jobs, shrimping required its own idiom of precise communication. For me this language was as comforting as mother’s milk and served as the background music of the part of my childhood spent afloat.
It all meant that my father’s boat, if properly handled, could catch one hell of a lot of shrimp.
In starlight we would gather around him on a thousand brilliant mornings. When we were small, he would take one of us into his lap and let us steer the boat and he would cor
rect our errors by exerting a gentle pressure on the wheel.
“I think we ought to be a little starboard, honey,” he would whisper to Savannah.
“You might want to remember that sandbar coming off Gander’s Point, Tom. That’s it. That’s the program.”
But mostly he would talk to himself, about business, politics, dreams, and disillusions. Because we were silent children and mistrustful of the man he became when he returned to land, we learned much about our father by listening to his voice as he spoke to darkness and to rivers and to the lights of other shrimp boats moving out for their grand appointment with the swarming shoals of shrimp. His voice in the morning was inexhaustible as we made our slow passage toward the barrier islands. Each day of his life in season was a duplication of the day before; tomorrow would always be an encore of today’s labor; yesterday would always be a rehearsal for a thousand future days, an elaboration on proven habits of excellence.
“Okay, kids,” he said on one of those long mornings, “this is the captain speaking. The captain and chief officer of the Miss Lila, a fifty-eight-foot shrimping vessel licensed by the state of South Carolina to ply the waters from the Grand Strand to Daufuskie Island, and today we’re heading due east of the lighthouse off Gatch’s Island and will set our nets in fifteen feet of water one-half mile to the starboard of the wreck of the Windward Mary. Yesterday we hauled up two hundred pounds of white shrimp in the thirty-fifty range. What do I mean by thirty-fifty shrimp, Savannah?”
“That means that there were between thirty and fifty shrimp in each pound, Daddy.”
“That’s my girl. The winds will be out of the north at eight miles an hour and small-craft warnings are in effect as far south as Brunswick, Georgia, and as far north as Wilmington, Delaware. The stock market fell five points in moderate trading yesterday because investors are worried about whatever it is investors worry about. Reese Newbury bought two hundred acres of farmland from Clovis Bishop yesterday for five hundred dollars an acre, which, in the way I figure, makes Melrose Island worth about half a million smacks at the going rate. The son of a bitch offered me twenty-five grand for the whole island last year and I told him it was an insult. Damn right, I did. He thinks ol’ Henry Wingo don’t know the value of property in this county. I’ve got the best piece of land in this state and I know it. So does your mother. I’m so far ahead of Newbury and those other assholes, it’s practically a crime. I got plans for our island, kids. Big plans. Long-range plans that I’ll put into effect as soon as I get a little working capital to play with. Don’t tell your mother yet, but I’m thinking of setting up a little chinchilla farm near the house. They got bozos all over this country getting rich off chinchilla and I’m not one to let a sure thing get away. I figure you little boogers could take turns feeding the little critters while I make the deals with the big-time furriers in New York and then laugh my way to the bank. What do you think? Smart, huh? Damn right. I was thinking about a mink ranch but chinchillas are a lot more cost-efficient. I’ve done my homework. Yes, sir, if you don’t do your homework, you can’t dance with the big boys. Your mother laughs at me, kids, and I’ll admit, I’ve made a few mistakes, but they were mistakes of timing. The ideas themselves were absolutely first class. You kids stick with me. I’m so far ahead of the average Joe it’s almost criminal. Ideas are always percolating in the old noggin. I’m burning up with schemes. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night just to write them down. Hey, you kids love the circus?”