The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  Just as the crew tracked the porpoise, the shrimpers of the town kept issuing reports on the position of The Amberjack on their short-wave radios. Whenever the boat changed course, the eyes of the shrimp fleet noted and remarked upon the shift of position, and the airwaves filled up with the voices of shrimpers passing messages from boat to boat, from boat to town. The shrimpers’ wives, monitoring their own radios, then got on the telephone to spread the news. The Amberjack could not move through county waters without its exact bearings being reported to a regiment of secret listeners.

  “Amberjack turning into Yemassee Creek,” we heard one day through the static of the radio my mother kept above the kitchen sink. “Don’t look like they found any Snow today.”

  “Miami Beach just left Yemassee Creek and appears to be settin’ to poke around the Harper Dogleg up by Goat Island.”

  The town carefully listened to these frequent intelligence reports of the shrimpers. For a week the white porpoise did not appear, and when she did it was one of the shrimpers who alerted the town.

  “This is Captain Willard Plunkett and Miami Beach has got the Snow in sight. They are pursuing her up the Colleton River and the crew is preparing the nets on deck. It looks like Snow is heading for a visit to town.”

  Word passed through the town in the old quicksilvering of rumor, and the prefigured power of that rumor lured the whole town to the river’s edge. People kept their eyes on the river and talked quietly. The sheriff pulled into the parking lot behind the bank and monitored the shrimpers’ reports. The eyes of the town were fixed on the bend in the Colleton River where The Amberjack would make its appearance. That bend was a mile from the point where the river joined three of its sister rivers and bloomed into a sound.

  For twenty minutes we waited for The Amberjack to make the turn, and when it did a collective groan rose up in the throats of us all. The boat was riding high above the marsh on an incoming tide. One of the crewmen stood on the foredeck with a pair of binoculars trained on the water in front of the boat. He stood perfectly still, rapt and statuesque, his complete immersion a testament to the passion he brought to his task.

  Luke, Savannah, and I watched from the bridge, along with several hundred of our neighbors who had gathered to witness the moment of capture of the town’s living symbol of good luck. The town was only curious until we saw Carolina Snow make her own luxurious appearance as she rounded the last curve of the river and began her silken, fabulous promenade through the town. She silvered as the sunlight caught her pale fin buttering through the crest of a small wave. In her movement through town she achieved a fragile sublimity, so unaware was she of her vulnerability. Burnished by perfect light, she dazzled us again with her complete and ambient beauty. Her dorsal fin broke the surface again like a white chevron a hundred yards nearer the bridge, and to our surprise, the town cheered spontaneously and the apotheosis of the white porpoise was fully achieved. The ensign of Colleton’s wrath unfurled in the secret winds and our status as passive observers changed imperceptibly as a battle cry, unknown to any of us, formed on our lips. All the mottoes and passwords of engagement appeared like fiery graffiti on the armorial bearings of the town’s unconscious. The porpoise disappeared again, then rose up, arcing toward the applause that greeted her sounding. She was mysterious and lunar. Her color was a delicate alchemy of lily and mother-of-pearl. The porpoise passed argentine beneath the sun-struck waters. Then we looked up and saw The Amberjack gaining ground on the Snow and the crew getting the nets into a small boat they were going to lower into the water.

  The town needed a warrior and I was surprised to find him standing beside me.

  Traffic jammed the bridge as drivers simply parked their cars and went to the bridge’s railing to watch the capture of the porpoise. A truck loaded down with tomatoes from one of Reese Newbury’s farms was stuck on the bridge and the driver was leaning on his horn in vain, trying to get the other drivers back into their cars.

  I heard Luke whisper to himself, “No. It just ain’t right,” and he left my side and mounted the back of the truck and began to toss crates of tomatoes down among the crowd. I thought Luke had gone crazy, but suddenly I understood, and Savannah and I bashed a crate of tomatoes open and began to pass them along the railing. The driver got out and screamed for Luke to stop, but Luke ignored him and continued passing the wooden crates down to the outstretched arms of his friends and neighbors. The driver’s voice grew more and more frantic as people began taking tire tools from their trunks and splitting the crates wide open. The sheriff’s car moved out of the parking lot and headed out toward the Charleston highway on the opposite side of town.

  When The Amberjack neared the bridge, two hundred tomatoes hit the deck in a green fusillade that put the man with the binoculars to his knees. The tomatoes were hard and green and one of the other crewmen working on the nets was holding his nose near the aft of the boat, blood leaking through his fingers. The second salvo of tomatoes followed soon afterward and the crew scrambled, dazed and insensible, toward the safety of the hold and cabin. A tire tool cracked against a lifeboat and the crowd roared its approval. Boxes of tomatoes were passed down the line, the driver still screaming and not a single soul listening to his pleadings.

  The Amberjack disappeared beneath the bridge and two hundred people crossed to the other side in a delirious, headlong rush. When the boat reappeared we showered it with tomatoes again, like archers on high ground pouring arrows on an ill-deployed infantry. Savannah was throwing hard and with accuracy, finding her own good rhythm, her own style. She was screaming with pure pleasure. Luke threw a whole crate of tomatoes and it smashed on the rear deck, sending ruined tomatoes skittering like marbles toward the battened-down hold.

  The Amberjack pulled out of range of all but the strongest arms when the porpoise, in a thoughtless gesture of self-preservation, reversed her course and turned back toward the town, passing the boat trailing her on its starboard side. She returned to our applause and our advocacy. We watched her move beneath the waters below the bridge, grizzling the bright waves like some abstract dream of ivory. When the boat made its long, hesitant turn in the river, even more crates of tomatoes were passed through the mob. By this time, even the truck driver had surrendered to whatever mass hysteria had possessed the rest of us and he stood with his arm cocked, holding a tomato, anticipating with the rest of us The Amberjack’ s imminent return. The boat started back for the bridge, then turned abruptly away from us and moved north on the Colleton River as Carolina Snow, the only white porpoise on our planet, moved back toward the Atlantic.

  The next day the town council passed a resolution enfranchising Carolina Snow as a citizen of Colleton County and making it a felony for anyone to remove her from county waters. At the same time, the South Carolina state legislature passed a similar law rendering it a felony for anyone to remove genus Phocaena or genus Tursiops from the waters of Colleton County. In less than twenty-four hours, Colleton County became the only place in the world where it was a crime to capture a porpoise.

  Captain Blair went straight to the sheriff’s office when he reached the shrimp dock that night and demanded that Sheriff Lucas arrest everyone who had thrown a tomato at The Amberjack. Unfortunately, Captain Blair could not provide the sheriff with a single name of even one of the miscreants, and the sheriff, after making several phone calls, could produce four witnesses who would swear in a court of law that no one had been on the bridge when The Amberjack passed beneath it.

  “Then how did I get a hundred pounds of tomatoes on the deck of my boat?” the captain had asked.

  And in a laconic reply that was well received in each Colleton household, the sheriff had answered, “It’s tomato season, Captain. Those damn things will grow anywhere.”

  But the men from Miami quickly recovered their will and developed a new plan for the capture of the porpoise. They kept out of sight of the town and did not enter the main channel of the Colleton River again. They began to haunt the outer
territorial limits of the county, waiting for that perfect moment when the Snow would wander out of county waters and beyond the protection of those newly contracted laws. But The Amberjack was shadowed by boats from the South Carolina Game and Fish Commission and by a small flotilla of recreational boats commanded by the women and children of the town. Whenever The Amberjack picked up the trail of the porpoise, the small crafts would maneuver themselves between the porpoise and the pursuing vessel and slow their motors. The Amberjack would try to weave between the boats, but these women and children of Colleton had handled small boats all their lives. They would interfere with the Florida boat’s progress until the white porpoise slipped away in the enfolding tides of Colleton Sound.

  Each day Luke, Savannah, and I would take our boat and ride up the inland waterway to join the flotilla of resistance. Luke would move the boat in front of The Amberjack’ s bow, ignoring the warning horn, and slow the Whaler by imperceptible degrees. No matter how skillfully Captain Blair maneuvered his boat, he could not pass Luke. Savannah and I had our fishing gear rigged and we trolled for Spanish mackerel as Luke navigated between The Amberjack and the white porpoise. Often, the crew would come out to the bow of the ship to threaten and taunt us.

  “Hey, kids, get out of our goddamn way before we get pissed off,” one crewman yelled.

  “Just fishing, mister,” Luke would shoot back.

  “What’re you fishing for?” The man sneered in exasperation.

  “We hear there’s a white porpoise in these waters,” said Luke, slowing the motor with a delicate movement of his wrist.

  “Is that right, smartass? Well, you’re not doing such a good job catching it.”

  “We’re doing as good as you are, mister,” Luke answered pleasantly.

  “If this were Florida, we’d run right over you.”

  “It ain’t Florida, mister. Or haven’t you noticed?” Luke said.

  “Hicks,” the man screamed.

  Luke pulled back the throttle and we slowed almost to a crawl. We could hear the big engines of The Amberjack throttling down behind us as the bow of the boat loomed over us.

  “He called us hicks,” Luke said.

  “Me, a hick?” Savannah said.

  “That hurts my feelings,” I said.

  Up ahead, the white porpoise turned into Langford Creek, the alabaster shine in her fin disappearing behind a green flange of marsh. There were three boats waiting at the mouth of the creek ready to intercept The Amberjack if it managed to get past Luke.

  After thirty days of delay and obstruction, The Amberjack left the southern boundaries of Colleton waters and returned to its home base of Miami without the white porpoise. Captain Blair gave a final embittered interview to the Gazette, listing the many obstacles the citizens of Colleton had erected to disrupt the mission of The Amberjack. Such deterrence, he said, could not be allowed to frustrate the integrity of scientific investigation. But on their last day, he and his crew had taken sniper fire from Freeman’s Island and he, as captain, had made the irrevocable decision to discontinue the hunt. The shrimp fleet observed The Amberjack as it passed the last barrier islands, maneuvered through the breakers, then turned south, angling toward the open seas.

  But The Amberjack did not go to Miami. It traveled south for forty miles, then turned into the mouth of the Savannah River, putting in to the shrimp dock at Thunderbolt. There it remained for a week to resupply and to let the passions in Colleton County cool, still monitoring the short-wave radio, following the travels of the white porpoise by listening to the Colleton shrimpers give accurate reports of her soundings. After a week The Amberjack left the harbor in Savannah in the middle of the night and turned north out beyond the three-mile limit. They cruised confidently out of sight of the shore-bound shrimp trawlers. They were waiting for one signal to come over the radio.

  They had been offshore for three days when they heard the words they had been waiting for.

  “There’s a submerged log I just netted in Zajac Creek, shrimpers. You boys be careful if you’re over this way. Out.”

  “There’s no shrimp in Zajac Creek anyhow, Captain,” a voice of another shrimp boat captain answered. “You a long way from home, ain’t you, Captain Henry? Out.”

  “I’ll catch the shrimp wherever I can find them, Captain. Out,” my father answered, watching Carolina Snow moving a school of fish toward a sandbar.

  Zajac Creek was not in Colleton County and The Amberjack turned west and came at full throttle toward the creek, the crew preparing the nets as the shoreline of South Carolina filled the eyes of Captain Blair for the last time. A shrimper from Charleston witnessed the capture of the white porpoise at 1130 hours that morning, saw Carolina Snow panic and charge the encircling nets, saw when she entangled herself, and admired the swiftness and skill of the crew as they got their ropes around her, held her head above the water to keep her from drowning, and maneuvered her into one of the motorboats.

  By the time the word reached Colleton, The Amberjack was well outside the three-mile limit again, set on a southerly course that would take them into Miami in fifty-eight hours. The bells of the church were rung in protest, an articulation of our impotence and fury. It was as if the river had been deconsecrated, purged of all the entitlements of magic.

  “Submerged log” was the code phrase my father had worked out with Captain Blair and the crew of The Amberjack. He had agreed to fish the boundary waters at the edge of the county until he sighted the white porpoise moving into the territorial waters of Gibbes County to the north. My father was the anonymous Colletonian who had written the Miami Seaquarium informing them of the presence of an albino porpoise in our county. Two weeks after the abduction of Snow and a week after her picture appeared in the Colleton Gazette being lowered into her aquarium tank in her new Miami home, my father received a letter of gratitude from Captain Blair and a check for a thousand dollars as a reward for his assistance.

  “I’m ashamed of what you did, Henry,” my mother said, barely able to control her temper as my father waved the check in front of us.

  “I earned a thousand big ones, Lila, and it was the easiest money I ever made in my life. I wish every porpoise I passed was an albino so I could spend all my time eating chocolate and buying banks.”

  “If anybody in this town had any guts, they’d go to Miami and set that animal free. You’d better not let anyone in town hear that you’re responsible, Henry. Folks are still steaming mad about that porpoise.”

  “How could you sell our porpoise, Daddy?” Savannah asked.

  “Look, sweetie, that porpoise is gonna be in fat city, chowing down on gourmet mackerel and jumping through hoops to make kids happy. Snow doesn’t have to worry about a shark the rest of her life. She’s retired in Miami. You got to look at it in a positive light.”

  “I think you’ve committed a sin that not even God can forgive, Daddy,” Luke said darkly.

  “You do?” My father sneered. “Hey, I never saw ‘Property of Colleton’ tattooed on her back. I just wrote the Seaquarium that Colleton had a natural phenomenon that could lure in the crowds and they rewarded me for being on my toes.”

  “They couldn’t have found him if you hadn’t radioed every time you spotted him in the river,” I said.

  “I was their liaison officer in the area. Look, it’s not that great a shrimping season. This thousand bucks is going to put food on the table and clothes on your back. This could pay for a whole year of college for one of you kids.”

  “I wouldn’t eat a bite of food you bought with that money,” Luke said. “And I wouldn’t wear a pair of Jockey shorts you bought with it either.”

  “I’ve been watching the Snow for more than five years now,” my mother said. “You once punished Tom for killing a bald eagle, Henry. There’s a lot more eagles in the world than white porpoises.”

  “I didn’t kill the porpoise, Lila. I delivered it to a safe harbor where it will be free of all fear. I look upon myself as the hero of this affair
.”

  “You sold Snow into captivity,” my mother said.

  “They’re going to make her a circus porpoise,” Savannah added.

  “You betrayed yourself and your sources,” Luke said. “If it was a businessman, I could understand. Some low-life creepy Jaycee with shiny hair. But a shrimper, Dad. A shrimper selling Snow for money.”

  “I sell shrimp for money, Luke,” my father shouted.

  “Not the same,” Luke said. “You don’t sell what you can’t replace.”

  “I saw twenty porpoises in the river today.”

  “And I promise you, Daddy, not one of them was white. None of them was special,” Luke said.

  “Our family is the reason they captured the Snow,” said Savannah. “It’s like being the daughter of Judas Iscariot, only I bet I’d have liked Judas a lot better.”

  “You shouldn’t have done what you did, Henry,” my mother said. “It’ll bring bad luck.”

  “I couldn’t have had any worse luck than I’ve had,” my father answered. “Anyway, it’s done. There’s nothing anyone can do about it now.”

  “I can do something about it,” said Luke.

  Three weeks later, in the languorous starry dark, when my parents were asleep and we could hear the soft chaos of my father’s snoring, Luke whispered a plan to us. It should not have surprised us, but years later, Savannah and I would talk and wonder about the exact hour when our older brother turned from a passionate, idealistic boy into a man of action. Both of us were terrified and exhilarated by the boldness of his proposal, but neither of us wanted any part of it. But Luke continued to urge us quietly until we found ourselves imprisoned by the magnetic originality of his gentle elo-quence. His decision was already made and he spent half the night enlisting us as recruits in his first real dance on the wild side. Ever since the night we watched him facing the tiger alone in the barn, we had known Luke was brave, but now we were faced with the probability that Luke was also reckless.