by Pat Conroy
“We’ve never been to the circus,” Luke said.
“Hey, that’s first on the old agenda. A must. Next time one gets near Charleston or Savannah, we’ll load up the pickup and get a front-row seat. You’ve just seen these little half-assed fairs that play the small towns, but we’ll fix that. I like the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The goddamn real McCoy. Don’t breathe a word about this plan to anybody. If I ever get a little nest egg stashed away, I’m going to set it up myself. I’m sick of assholes using my ideas to become millionaires. Watch it now, Luke. There’s the buoy up ahead. When you pass it, head across the river at a forty-five-degree angle right toward the North Star. Good boy. You’re a natural, son. There’s a rock pile up ahead where ol’ man Winn gutted his boat a couple of years go. I once pulled two hundred pounds out of this creek on a full tide. But it’s not usually a productive creek. I’ve never figured out why one creek would yield more shrimp than another from year to year, but that’s just the way it is. Shrimp are funny. They’ve got their natural preferences just like folks.”
He was in the middle of a lifelong soliloquy, a loosely organized high-octave monologue addressed to no one in particular. There was such fluency and eloquence in these morning valedictories that I imagined him declaiming away even when his children were absent from the wheel house. These were his private discourses and musings with the universe and he thought no more of the presence of his mute, attentive children than he did of the stars in the belt of Orion. In the boat, as he talked, we might as well have been landscape, still life, inanimate listeners. From the galley below, the rising aromas of breakfast came to us, and these pillows of smells would cut through my father’s voice. As Lester Whitehead cooked, the smell of coffee, bacon, and biscuits enfolded the boat in invisible trailing sleeves of the most cutting aromas. As we passed close to the entrance of the main sound, we set the tables for breakfast in the dreams of sleepers who slept near the river with their windows open. The engine murmured below us and a music played through the vibrating timbers of the boat’s wood frame and the river was panther-colored before dawn and it sang to the town in soft canticles of those tides that bore us gloriously out toward the breakers beyond the most beautiful sea islands in the world. Here my father was most comfortable and relaxed. Only on the river were we safe to visit with him. He never hit us once when we were on the shrimp boat. There, we were workers, brothers of the nets, and he treated us with the dignity he accorded to all mariners who make their living on the water.
Yet nothing my father could accomplish as a shrimper would ever have value to my mother. In my mother’s eyes, my father was vulnerable, helpless, and shrill. He tried hard to remake himself in the image of the man he thought she wanted him to be. He hungered for my mother’s unqualified respect. His efforts were self-defeating and pathetic, but he could not help himself. Their marriage was dissonant and harsh. His success as a shrimper financed his disastrous business schemes. The bankers laughed behind his back. He became a joke in town. His children heard the jokes at school; his wife heard them on the streets of Colleton.
But on the river, Henry Wingo was in harmony with the planet and the shrimp seemed to come to his nets singing with pleasure. He pulled up tons of shrimp each season and kept careful and meticulous records of his catch. By consulting his log book, he could tell you where he caught each and every pound of shrimp he ever lifted out of Colleton waters, the depth of the tides at the time, the conditions of the weather. “The whole banana,” he called it. The river was the dark text my father had memorized for joy. I could trust the man when there was water beneath him and shrimp filling up his billowing nets. But it was on the same water that he concocted the schemes that kept him dangling precariously on the high wire between ruin and his dreams of sudden wealth.
“Next year, I’m thinking about planting watermelons,” he said one night at dinner.
“No, please no, Henry,” my mother said. “If you plant watermelons, then Colleton will find itself covered by a blizzard or a flood or a plague of locusts. Please don’t plant anything, Henry. Think of another way to lose all of our money. You’re the only person I know who couldn’t grow kudzu.”
“You’re right, Lila. As usual, you’re absolutely right. I’m much more of a technocrat than I am a farmer. I’m more comfortable working with sound business or economic principles than I am with agriculture. I think I knew that all along but I saw all these other big shots making money growing tomatoes and I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon.”
“Don’t jump on any more bandwagons, Henry. Let’s invest any extra money in blue chip stocks, like South Carolina Electric and Gas.”
“I bought a Bell and Howell movie camera in Charleston today, Lila.”
“For God’s sake why, Henry?”
“The future is film,” my father answered, his eyes gleaming.
As my mother began screaming, my father calmly pulled out his new hand-held camera, plugged a cord into an outlet, turned on the spotlight, and recorded her entire diatribe for the amusement of posterity. Through the years, he operated the camera relentlessly. He filmed weddings, christenings, and family reunions. In the local paper, he advertised under the preposterous logo of “Wingo’s Professional Cinematics.” He would lose less money in his movie business than in any of the others. Looking through the aperture of his movie camera, my father was a perfectly happy and perfectly ridiculous man.
My father did not lack the courage of his convictions and it was Savannah who remarked that this peculiarity of his ungovernable temperament was his greatest flaw.
So he continued a brilliant career on the river diminished by his passionate and futile attraction to free enterprise. There were other failed projects we did not learn about until long after we were adults. He was a silent partner in a putt-putt golf course in Myrtle Beach that folded after one season. He invested in a taco stand run by a genuine Mexican who spoke in flawed, imperfect English and could not make tacos. My parents had appalling fights over money and how it was spent. My mother mocked him, screamed at him, scolded him, cajoled and pleaded with him, all to no avail. He was not susceptible to her inclination for restraint or moderation. Her arguments always took the form of a cautionary tale, and when that failed, she would scream out a terrifying summation of the apocalypse that would ensue if he continued to waste their money indiscriminately. Their storms and eruptions disfigured whatever tranquility was natural to our home. Since their arguments were so common, we did not see the exact moment when my mother’s umbrage and cross-grained wrath turned into a deadly hatred of my father. But the cycle of her impotent rage began early and there were years of fruitless interchange before my mother entered the field of fire with her own bitter reprisals. Henry Wingo believed that women should never discuss business. There were two types of southern men: those who listened to their wives and those who did not; my father had a black belt degree in turning a deaf ear to my mother.
If you grow up in the house of a man who both loves and mistreats you, and who does not grasp the paradox of his behavior, you become, out of self-defense, a tenacious student of his habits, a weatherman of his temperament. I made summaries of my father’s most conspicuous flaws and figured out early that he was both opéra bouffe and blunt instrument. If he had not been cruel, I think his children would have adored Henry Wingo, and that sense of adoration would have been boundless and accommodating to all the strange geodesics of his fortune. But early in my life he had installed himself as a cheapshot emperor in a house where women and children were wise to be afraid. His approach was always heavy and inconscient. He employed a scorched-earth policy in the raising of his children and the taming of a strong-willed wife.
In an early poem, Savannah called him “the liege of storm, the thane of winds” and when she came to New York, she always claimed, smiling, that she and her brothers had been fathered by a blitzkrieg. He avoided all that was lovely. He feared delicacy as though it were a corruption that would undermine all the fundamental sc
ruples he held sacred.
All he lacked was brains, my mother said, through tears.
“The Sadim touch,” Savannah whispered to me behind closed doors one Christmas after my mother discovered that my father had three thousand boxes of unsold Christmas cards left, which he had bought on consignment. He had sold only seventy-five boxes going door to door in Charleston.
“It’s the complete opposite of the Midas touch,” Savannah said. “Everything Dad touches turns to shit.”
“He didn’t even tell Mom that he bought thousands of Easter cards, too,” Luke said. “I found them in the barn.”
“He always loses a pile of money,” Savannah said.
“Did you see the Christmas cards he was selling?” Luke asked from his bed.
“No.”
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, the angels, everybody—they were all colored people.”
“What?”
“That’s right. Dad was only selling them to Negro families. He heard they were selling like hotcakes up North, so he thought he’d jump on the bandwagon down here.”
“Poor Dad,” I said. “What a dimwit.”
“It gives you a lot of confidence knowing his blood is running through your veins,” Savannah said. “How humiliating!”
“Has he ever made money on anything?”
“Shrimping,” Luke said. “He’s the best shrimper that ever lived. It’s too bad that’s not enough for the both of them.”
“If he did, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Sadim touch,” Savannah said.
“You can make fun of him all you want, Savannah,” Luke said, “but always remember that our father turns to Midas when he puts his nets into the water.”
I believe my parents’ marriage might have endured out of sheer habit if my father had not bought the gas station and we had not gone to the traveling circus that made a stop near Colleton for the first time in history. I think their life together would have been redeemable, if not ecstatic, if my father could have learned to control the impulses that led him to such excessive and futile gestures. And he made his most flamboyant decisions without allowing my mother the common courtesy of her advice. He treated his business ventures as though they were covert actions, the work of an intelligence officer cut off from communication with his home office, operating freestyle in a hostile environment. Each deal was to be the restoration of his lost honor and lost capital. He never forfeited the faith in his ability to regenerate his dreams through the successful conclusion of one of his extraordinary improvisations. With my father, business was both his contagion and his asylum; it was an incurable illness, a form of gambling and self-destruction. I think that if someone had handed him a million dollars, he could have devised a thousand imaginative ways to squander every penny of it. It was not his fatal flaw—no, he had at least a dozen of these—but it was certainly one of his most dramatic, and the one that kept his family in a precarious situation. His faith in himself was endemic and incorrigible. To protect herself and us, my mother became cunning in handling money and secretive in handling him. They undermined the entire superstructure of their vulnerable love through a lifetime of evasion and subterfuge. Both of them became adept at killing off the best qualities of the other. In some ways, there was something classic and quintessentially American in their marriage. They began as lovers and ended up as the most dangerous and unutterable of enemies. As lovers, they begat children; as enemies, they created damaged, endangered children.
Like all of his pronouncements, my father waited until dinnertime to announce the fact that he had purchased the defunct Esso station near the Colleton Bridge. He believed implicitly in my mother’s good manners at mealtime.
“I’ve got some great news,” my father said, but his voice was charged with uncertainty, a rare vulnerability. “Especially for the boys.”
“How exciting for the girl,” Savannah said, quietly eating her soup.
“What is it, Daddy?” Luke asked. “Did you buy me a new catcher’s mitt?”
“Naw. Your old one’s just fine. We were tougher when I played ball. We didn’t whine for a new glove every year.”
“Luke’s hand can’t fit in the glove anymore, Dad,” I said. “Neither can mine. He’s had that glove since Little League.”
“I bought us a little business today,” he said, averting his eyes from my mother. “I’ve always believed the key to success was diversification. After that lousy season with the shrimp, I figured we needed a little nest egg to fall back on in times of emergency.”
“What is it this time, Henry?” my mother said, controlling herself with effort. “What have you done to us this time and when will you ever learn? When will you have enough? We don’t have a nickel in our savings account, so how could you even think about buying anything?”
“Banks are there to lend credit, honey. That’s their job.”
“But they lend money to people who have money. That’s their real job,” she retorted. “What did you use for collateral, Henry? You didn’t mortgage the shrimp boat again?”
“No,” he admitted, “I haven’t quite finished paying off that last mortgage. I had to be a little creative to pull off this deal. Creative financing, they call it.”
“Who calls it that?”
“The big boys. That’s who calls it that.”
“Since we’re practically paupers, it must have been damn creative, Henry,” my mother said, her mouth a thin line across her face like a knife-cut on a piece of fruit. “You didn’t mortgage the island, did you, Henry? Tell me you didn’t mortgage the only real thing we’ve got. Tell me you didn’t mortgage our future and the future of our children. Even you aren’t that stupid, Henry.”
“I didn’t mortgage all the island,” he said, “just forty acres of it near the bridge. It’s so marshy over there you couldn’t raise swamp cabbage. I think I took them pretty good if you ask me. And I thought it was time to branch out into other fields. I can even get my fuel for my shrimp boat now that I run my own service station.”
“How are you going to drive your shrimp boat to the pumps across three hundred yards of marsh grass?” my mother said furiously. “I can’t stand this, Henry. I simply can’t tolerate this. The kids will be off to college soon.”
“College?” my father said. “I never went to college. Let them get out and work for it if they want college so bad.”
“Our children are going to college. We’ve been paying up on those insurance policies since they were babies and I’m giving that to them at least. They’re going to have a chance we didn’t have, Henry. I’m not going to let them get trapped like we did. We discussed this when we were first married, and you agreed with me a hundred percent.”
“I had to cash in those insurance policies,” my father said. “They wanted some hard cash down on the gas station. But I’m gonna make enough money to buy them a college if that’s what they really want.”
“You sold your children’s education for a gas station, Henry Wingo?” my mother asked, and her shock was genuine. “You sold their land and their future so you could pump gas and check oil?”
“The boys can work there during the summers. I got Lanny Whittington to promise that he’ll run the station. We’re employing people now, Lila. The boys can take over the station one day.”
“You think I want Tom and Luke making their living pumping gas?”
“I don’t mind pumping gas, Mama,” Luke said.
“I’ve got bigger plans for you than that, Luke. For all of you,” she said.
“She only wants her precious boys to pump high-test gasoline,” my father sneered. “Besides, there’s no use jawing about it. Wingo Esso has its grand opening a week from Tuesday. It’s going to be a real extravaganza. Balloons, free Cokes, ribbons, fireworks. I’ve even hired a clown from that traveling circus to entertain the children.”
“You don’t need to hire a clown, Henry. You already got one who owns the gas station.”
“You�
��ve always lacked vision, Lila,” my father said, stung. “Who knows what I’d have accomplished if I’d married a woman who believed in me.”
“I know, Henry. I know very well. Not a goddamn thing,” my mother said, getting up from the table and walking quickly to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
When she was gone, my father looked around at us and said, “Isn’t there anyone who’s going to congratulate me? This is a big moment in the Wingo family’s history.”