by Pat Conroy
“You’ve got to keep him busy, Tom,” Luke would say.
“What do you want me to do? Let him chew on my fist?”
“Whistle ‘Dixie,’ ” Luke said, brushing gravel from his back. “Do anything.”
“I don’t want him relating me to a seal in any way.”
Luke would stand near the cage and watch Caesar crack chicken necks as if he were melting butter on his tongue.
“This is the prince of the animal kingdom,” he said, “the most beautiful animal in the world.”
“Why couldn’t Esso have a different advertising campaign, Luke?” I complained. “You know, something like ‘Put a guppy in your tank’ or ‘Put a hamster in your tank.’ ”
“Because they just aren’t interesting animals, Tom. Not like Caesar. He doesn’t give of himself lightly. I like that. I really like that. He makes you earn it all.”
Ferguson’s Gulf station started the first full-fledged gas war in Colleton’s history. Ferguson lowered the price of gasoline a nickel a gallon and my father had little choice but to follow suit. In vain, he did everything to keep his station open, but it was rumored that Ferguson had picked up a powerful sponsor. When the bank finally repossessed our station, the price for a gallon of gasoline had fallen from thirty cents a gallon to a dime. Dad tried to include the tiger as a disposable asset, but the bank refused. Once again there were terrible arguments, sad, interminable arguments, in the house of Wingo. Dad had managed to pay back the mortgage against the island land but lost everything else. Again we were in desperate financial straits and again he made us solvent by having his best year as a shrimper. Soon after the loss of the gas station, Reese Newbury drove out to the island in his Cadillac and offered to buy the island for fifty thousand dollars with no questions asked. My father refused. A week later my father discovered it was Reese Newbury who had been the silent financial partner who ensured the success of Ferguson’s Gulf during the gasoline war.
“He thought he could get my island,” my father said. “He ruined my business because he wanted the island.”
So my father went back to the river and my mother grew more silent and more embittered and the Wingos ended up as the only family in Colleton County with a tiger who could jump through a burning ring as a pet.
Throughout my childhood I would find myself studying my parents when they were reposed and peaceful in their home. Secretly, I would try to figure out what made it work, what sinister or benevolent forces kept their militant alliance intact, what tender or explosive elements lay beneath the surface of their strange and incandescent love for each other. For I could always feel the fury of some higher love shimmering between them, even in their worst and most dangerous moments. It was something I could only feel, never touch. I could not figure out what my mother saw in my father or why she remained as both ruler and prisoner in his house. Their signals were always mixed and confused and I could never sound the depths of their always volatile relationship. It was clear my father adored my mother, but it was not clear to me why a man should feel compelled to abuse what he loved the most. My mother often seemed to despise everything my father stood for, but there were moments of strange complicity when I would see a look pass between them so charged with passion and awareness of the other that I would blush for having accidentally shared it. I wondered how I would come to love a woman, and with both pleasure and terror, I would think that somewhere in the world there was some laughing, singing girl who would one day become my wife. In my mind, I could see her dancing and playing and flirting in preparation for that day of awe and wonder when we would meet and in mutual ecstasy declare, “I shall live with you forever.” How much of my father would I bring to that singing girl’s life? How much of my mother? And how many days would it take before I, Tom Wingo, child of storm, would silence her laughter and song for all time? How long would it take for me to end the dance of that laughing girl who would not know the doubts and imperfections I brought to the task of loving a woman? I loved the image of this girl long before I ever met her and wanted to warn her to beware the day when I would come into her life. Somewhere in America she was waiting out her childhood innocent of her destiny. She did not know that she was on a collision course with a boy so damaged and bewildered he would spend his whole life trying to figure out how love was supposed to feel, how it manifested itself between two people, and how it could be practiced without rage and sorrow and blood. I was thirteen years old when I decided that this wonderful girl deserved much better and I would warn her long before I interfered with her lovely passage and transfiguring dance.
During these meditations on the nature of love, I held fast to one story of my parents that my father told again and again as he moved his boat in darkness out toward the Atlantic breakers. It was the story of their first meeting in Atlanta, when my father was a young lieutenant visiting the town for the first time on leave and my mother was selling children’s clothing in Davison’s department store on Peachtree. There was always rapture on his face and pleasure in my father’s voice when he told of their chance encounter. He was a stranger in town and wanted to meet some city girls and a barber had told him that the. prettiest girls in the South could be found walking on Peachtree Street. He was wearing his uniform and felt handsome as only young men about to go to war can feel. He spotted my mother coming out of Davison’s when she got off work and he said he had never seen a more beautiful girl in his life. She was carrying a shopping bag and a red purse and she crossed the street through traffic to get to the bus stop. He followed her, trying to figure out how to approach her, how to speak to her, how to ask her name. He was shy with girls, but he was afraid the bus would come and she would disappear from his life forever, before he had the chance to praise her beauty or hear the sound of her name. Boldly, he introduced himself and told her that he was a pilot in the Army Air Corps and in Atlanta on furlough and he would appreciate it highly if she could show him around her city. She ignored him and looked down Peachtree for the bus. Desperate, he told her that she seemed unpatriotic, that he would be off to the war in a year or two, that he would most likely be killed but that he could accept his fate if she would just let him take her to dinner. He told jokes and tried to make her laugh. He told her he was Errol Flynn’s younger brother, that his father owned Davison’s, that he wished it was raining so he could throw his coat over a mud puddle and let her step across it. The bus approached from the south and he could not stop talking. Like any properly raised southern girl, my mother continued to ignore him, but my father noticed that she was amused. From his back pocket, he pulled out a letter from his mother and pretended it was a letter of recommendation from Franklin D. Roosevelt, testifying that Lieutenant Henry Wingo was a man of sterling character who could be trusted by any American young woman, especially the prettiest woman ever seen on Peachtree Street in the history of Atlanta. My mother blushed and stepped up onto the bus and paid her fare without looking back. Walking down the aisle, she took a seat by an open window. My father stood outside the bus below that window and begged her to give him her phone number. She smiled and considered it. The bus began to pull away from the curb and my father raced alongside it. As the bus shifted into second gear, my father, sprinting as fast as he ever ran in his life, fell behind and lost the image of my mother’s face framed in the window. He kept running, even though the bus was almost past him when he saw my mother’s head sticking out the window and he heard her cry out the first words she ever directed to him, “Macon three-seven, two, eight, four.”
When my father would tell that story, Savannah would always whisper, “Tell him the wrong number, Mama. Please tell him the wrong number.” Or she would say, “Forget the number, Dad. Just forget it.”
But he remembered. Henry Wingo remembered as he steered his boat through tides.
The tiger in the back yard became a source of embarrassment to my mother and a source of constant joy to Luke. To my mother, Caesar was symbolic of my father’s clumsiest and most ill-manage
d folly, the living heraldry of defeat recumbent among a pile of bones. But Luke discovered a natural and artless affinity for tigers and he began a slow apprenticeship designed to gain both Caesar’s trust and his affection. It was Luke’s theory that Smitty had abused Caesar and that the tiger, like any animal, would respond to a soft laying on of hands and a long strategic season of kindness. Luke was the only one who fed Caesar and it took more than two months before Luke could approach the cage without Caesar trying to pull him through the bars. Then, there came the day when I found Luke scratching the tiger’s back with a garden rake. The tiger was purring in ecstasy and I watched, stricken, as Luke reached inside the cage and scratched the tiger’s great golden head with his hand.
Three months after we brought the tiger home, Savannah woke me up during a rainstorm and whispered, “You ain’t gonna believe this one.”
“It’s two o’clock in the morning, Savannah,” I said irritably. “Juries don’t even convict people who kill their sisters after being woke up at two o’clock in the morning.”
“Luke is with Caesar.”
“I don’t care if he’s with the three Magi. I want to go back to sleep.”
“He’s got the tiger out of the cage. In the barn.”
We went out the window and silently made our way to the barn. Slowly we peered through the slight crack in the barn door and in the lantern light saw Luke with a chain and a whip, sending Caesar in controlled circles around the barn. Luke then lit rags soaked in kerosene and called for the tiger to go through the burning ring. “Now, Caesar,” he said, and the tiger flowed through the ring like sunshine through a glass window. Caesar made another turn around the barn and came roaring back in that same fluid motion, going through that burning circle in a celebration of strength and speed. Luke then cracked the whip three times in succession and the tiger walked to the open door of his cage and jumped inside. Luke rewarded him with venison steaks and nuzzled his head against Caesar’s when the steaks were devoured.
“He’s crazy,” I whispered to Savannah.
“No,” she said, “that’s your brother Luke. And he’s magnificent.”
14
I grew up loathing Good Fridays. It was a seasonal aversion that had little to do with theology but everything to do with the rites of worship and the odd slant my grandfather brought to his overenthusiastic commemoration of Christ’s passion.
Good Friday was the day when Amos Wingo each year walked to the shed behind his house in Colleton proper and dusted off the ninety-pound wooden cross he had made in a violent seizure of religious extravagance when he was a boy of fourteen. From noon to three on that commemorative day he would walk up and down the length of the Street of Tides to remind the backsliding, sinful citizenry of my hometown of the unimaginable suffering of Jesus Christ on that melancholy hill above Jerusalem so long ago. It was the summit and the Grand Guignol of my grandfather’s liturgical year; it embodied characteristics of both the saints and the asylum. There was always a lunatic beauty to his walk.
I would have preferred that my grandfather celebrated Good Friday in a quieter, more contemplative fashion. It embarrassed me deeply to watch his gaunt, angular body bent under the weight of the cross, trudging through the congested traffic, stopping at intersections, oblivious to the admixture of scorn and awe of his townsmen, sweat discoloring his costume, and his lips moving continuously in the inaudible worship of his Creator. He was a figure of majesty to some, a perfect jackass to others. Each year the sheriff would issue a ticket for obstructing traffic and each year the parishioners of the Baptist church would take up a special collection to pay the fine. Through the years, his offbeat spiritual trek of remembrance had become something of a venerated annual phenomenon and had begun to attract a sizable ingathering of pilgrims and tourists who collected along the Street of Tides to pray and read the Bible as Grandpa Wingo huffed and puffed his way through his solemn reenactment of the single walk that changed the history of the Western soul. Each year the Colleton Gazette published a photograph of his walk the week following Easter Sunday.
When we were children, both Savannah and I would beg him to take his act to Charleston or Columbia, cities we considered to be far more gaudy and reprehensible in the eyes of the Lord than small, mild Colleton could ever be. My grandmother expressed her own mortification by retreating to her bedroom with a full bottle of Beefeater gin and a collection of back issues of Police Gazette that she had commandeered from Fender’s barbershop. When the walk was completed at three, so was the bottle, and my grandmother would be comatose until late the next morning. When she awoke to her memorial headache, she would find my grandfather on his knees, praying for her sweet, boozy soul.
During the entire Easter vigil, Amos would watch over the recumbent, motionless body of his wife, who had elaborated her own ritual as an act of self-defense to protest the ceremony of observance he insisted on performing. There was a bizarre euphony in the counterbalance of their spirits. On Sunday morning, sickened by her debauch but having made her annual point, my grandmother, as she put it, “rose from the goddamn dead” in time to accompany my grandfather to Easter Sunday services. It was her only church appearance of the year and, in its own way, became as traditional in the spiritual life of the town as my grandfather’s walk.
In my junior year, on the Wednesday before Easter, I walked to my grandfather’s house after school with Savannah. We stopped by Long’s Pharmacy for a cherry Coke and took it out by the river and drank it sitting on the sea wall, watching the fiddler crabs wave their claws in the mud below us.
“Good Friday is coming up again,” I said to my sister. “I hate that day.”
She grinned and punched me on the arm, saying, “It’s good for a family to face total humiliation once a year. It’s character-building to have a whole town laugh at your grandfather, then laugh at you.”
“I wouldn’t mind it if I didn’t have to be there,” I answered, my eyes fixed on the hypnotic movement of the crabs beneath us. They were like quarters scattered randomly across the mud. “Dad’s putting you on the lemonade stand this year. He’s going to film the major highlights of the walk again.”
“Oh, grotesque,” she said. “He’s filmed it for the past five years. He’s got five years of film to prove to any court that grandpa’s a lunatic.”
“Dad says it’s for the family archives and that we’ll thank him one day for making a record of our childhood.”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “That’s all I want. A photographic history of Auschwitz. Of course, you think this is a normal family.”
“I don’t know if it’s a normal family or not,” I said. “It’s the only family I’ve ever lived in.”
“It’s a nut-house factory. Mark my words.”
My grandfather’s house in Colleton was a simple one-story frame house, painted white with red trim, built on a half acre of land beside the Colleton River. When we entered the house we found our grandmother in the kitchen watching my grandfather work on his cross in the back yard.
“There he is,” she said in a weary, exasperated voice, nodding toward the back yard as she saw us enter. “Your grandpa. My husband. The village idiot. He’s been working on his prop all day.”
“What’s he doing to it, Tolitha?” I asked, calling her by her given name according to her own desires.
“A wheel,” Savannah said, laughing as she ran to the window.
“He said folks won’t mind a sixty-year-old man putting a wheel on his cross. He said that Jesus was only thirty-three when he took a walk up that hill, so no one should expect a sixty-year-old man to do much better. He gets softer in the head each year. I’m going to have to put him in a home soon. No question about it. The highway patrol was out here again this week trying to get him to hand in his driver’s license. They say he’s a danger on the road every time he takes his Ford for a spin.”
“Why did you marry him, Tolitha?” Savannah asked. “It seems ridiculous that two people so different in every wa
y could live together.”
My grandmother looked out toward the yard again, the window reflected off her glasses in a trapezoid of light, repeating in glass what she saw from the window. The question had taken her by surprise and I realized Savannah had asked one of those forbidden questions, one with daunting implications, whose mystery predated our own birth.
“Let me get you some iced tea,” Tolitha said finally. “He’ll dawdle in here in a while and I don’t get a chance to visit with you so much now that you’re grown and out spoonin’ and such.”
She poured three huge glasses of tea, then floated mint leaves above the chipped ice. When she sat on her stool, she adjusted her eyeglasses over her nose.
“I knew your grandpa was a Christian man when I first met him. That’s because everybody in town was Christian then. I was a Christian, too, only I was fourteen when we got married, too young to know anything one way or the other. It wasn’t until later that I realized he was a fanatic. He kind of hid it from me when we were courting because he was so riled up and eager to get at me.”