The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “Excuse me, poopy-doop,” Luke said, pinching Savannah on the cheek. “I’ve got to teach my baby brother to have respect for his elders.”

  “Don’t hurt him, Luke. He just can’t hold his liquor.”

  “Can’t hold my liquor?” I screamed, having a grand time and taking another swig from the bottle. “I can drink any man in this county under the table. Now you sit down, Luke. I don’t want to embarrass you in front of the womenfolk.”

  Luke rose up off the dock and I lifted up unsteadily to meet him. I had that aura of alcoholic invincibility around me but I wove unsteadily as I moved forward to challenge him. Lunging, I tried to get him in a headlock and got a clear glimpse of the Big Dipper as Luke picked me up and threw me somersaulting into the creek. I came up choking and spitting water and heard Savannah’s laughter echoing across the marsh.

  “You college football players are hell,” Luke said to me as I fought the tide and swam back to the bridge.

  “You better not have ruined my new sport coat, Luke, or we’re going to have a fistfight every day this summer.”

  “You shouldn’t be wearing the sport coat in this heat,” Luke said as he jumped into the creek with me. We wrestled in the water and he dunked me several times before I cried uncle.

  “C’mon, Savannah,” Luke called out. “Take off your shoes and let’s swim back to the house like we used to do when we were kids.”

  I removed my shoes and pants and sport coat and passed them up to Savannah. She took off her cotton dress and stood in her panties and bra above us, statuesque and beautiful in the moonlight.

  She lifted the bottle of bourbon high in the air and shouted, “Let’s make final toasts to our future. First, I’ll toast Tom. What do you want out of life, quarterback?”

  Floating on my back, I looked up into my sister’s moonstruck face and said, “I’m going to be a good ordinary citizen.”

  “Then let’s drink to ordinariness,” she said and took a swallow. “And now, Luke, let’s toast you.”

  “I’m a shrimper. I’m going to be steady.”

  “To steadiness. A toast,” she said.

  “What about you, New York?” I asked. “Let us give you a toast.”

  “I plan to write poetry and go wild. I plan to be not only wild but positively sinful. I’m going to get naked and march in parades down Fifth Avenue. I’m going to have affairs with men, women, and animals. I’ll buy a parrot and teach it to cuss. Like Dad, I’m going to get it all on film and send it back as home movies.”

  “Hand me down the bottle,” Luke said, swimming toward the bridge. He took the bottle from Savannah and took a drink as he drifted with the tide toward me. “To wildness,” he said, drinking, and handed the bottle to me, holding it aloft above the water.

  “To Savannah Wingo,” I screamed. “The wildest goddamn woman ever to pass through the Holland Tunnel.”

  “Goodbye, Colleton,” she screamed out toward the Atlantic. “Goodbye, South. Goodbye, football. Goodbye, rednecks. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Daddy. And hello, Big Apple.”

  As I finished the bottle, Savannah executed a perfect front-flip and entered the water with barely a ripple.

  And we let the soft tides carry us home.

  It was the best summer I would ever have on the island and I prepared myself slowly for the leave-taking. To my surprise, I discovered I did not know how to live without my family gathered around me. Only a few times in my life had I slept away from the sounds of my family sleeping. I was not quite ready to abandon the only life I have ever known or was meant to know up to this time. There was no corrective for growing up and the terror of departure was upon me, insinuating itself in the very rhythms of my tenuous gestures of farewell. I was trying to form the secret words that my heart was screaming out with an inarticulate and soundless passion. An eighteen-year banquet of light and grief was coming to an end and I couldn’t stand it and I couldn’t tell them what I felt. A family is one of nature’s solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater. It is summer again and silence and heat are the contending kings along the riverbanks. In the paper we read that fire ants have crossed the Savannah River and have established a colony in South Carolina. Near Kiawah Island, Luke hooked and captured his first tarpon after an hour-long fight. The great fish leapt and danced across the waves, powerful as a horse. When we finally got the tarpon into the boat, Luke kissed the fish, then released it in a gesture of both awe and gratitude. Savannah spent the summer painting watercolors and writing poems in imitation of Dylan Thomas. The days ended soundlessly and fireflies disturbed the dusk with their codes of errant light.

  I tried to marshal the fragments of wisdom I had learned as an island child and put them in order like some undiscovered archipelago I could return to at will. I counted the dilatory passing of days as though they were beads on a rosary dissolving in my hands. I woke up early each morning and saw my father leave for the shrimp boat. At night, the fireflies floated through the darkness in a shifting accidental zodiac. Tense and self-conscious, we were gentle with each other in the green summering of June.

  In my mother’s eyes we interpreted a dark text that we translated as a fear of middle age, a loss of purpose in her life. She did not know how to face a world without being a mother. With our new freedom, she lost her sense of definition. We were uneasy about leaving her to face a life with my father alone. She was angry with us and took our growing up as an act of betrayal beyond all powers of forgiveness. Not once that summer would she let us work with our father on the shrimp boat. She demanded that we be full-time children for a last memorial summer. She was thirty-seven years old as her life as a mother was ending and she could not stand the thought of presiding over a house robbed of her children’s laughter and tears. We spent almost all of our time with her as the shrimp filled up the creeks again and the cattle egrets, like pillars of fresh salt, formed small colonnades in the fields in the center of the island. Everything was as it had always been, but it was about to change, horribly, irrevocably. We were coming to the moment when all the liturgies of habit would disassemble in a singular, life-transfiguring encounter.

  On July nineteenth, my mother celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday, and we gave her a party. Savannah made her a chocolate cake and Luke and I took the boat into town and bought her the largest bottle of Chanel No. 5 that Sarah Poston sold in her dress shop. Mrs. Poston assured us that only women who were “très elegante” wore Chanel. Even though her salesmanship was much better than her French, we bought the perfume and watched as she wrapped the gift in pale lavender paper.

  On the night of her birthday, my mother had to blow three times to extinguish all the candles, and as her family teased her, she worried that she was coming down with a hideous lung disease caused by her advancing age. In the gold light of candles, my mother’s face glowed with uncommon beauty. When she smiled at me, I felt cleansed in the secret grotto of her highest affection. She kissed me that night and I smelled the Chanel sweetening a small vein in her neck. As she held me, I wanted to cry out with all the wildness and tenderness a boy brought to the task of loving his mother. I wanted to tell her that I understood everything and that I held nothing against either her or my father for our life on the island. But I remained silent, my head against her shoulder, smelling the sweetness of her hair.

  That night Luke surprised us all by breaking down while listening to Savannah and me talk about leaving the island at the end of August. Like my mother, he refused to acknowledge that our lives would be different and that our childhood was now unrecallable, a piece of music lost on the continuum of time, ineffable and wordless. Luke trembled when he wept, a soft adagio of suffering, but his sorrow was suffused with strength. With Luke in tears, you could learn something of the melancholy of kings, the solemnity of a scarred lion banished from a pride. I longed to hold my brother and feel his face against mine. But I could not. It was Savannah who took Luke into her arms and swore to him that nothing would change. Luke belonged to the i
sland. Savannah and I were simply born on Melrose Island; we were never a part of it in any vital and essential way. At least, that was the myth that sustained us, that nourished our glad dream of voyage beyond the confinements and eclipses of family.

  “What’s all the boo-hooing about?” my father asked.

  “Luke’s just sad that we’re leaving him,” Savannah explained.

  “For godsakes, get control of yourself, son,” my father said. “You’re a shrimper now, Luke. Shrimpers aren’t the boo-hooing type.”

  “Quiet, Henry,” my mother said, “and leave the boy alone.”

  “I sure did raise a sensitive family,” my father, isolated again, answered. “Nothing I hate worse than a sensitive family.”

  That night we lay on our backs on the floating dock and felt the whole river fill up with the grandeur of completion as it neared the headwaters of the sea. In the scant light of a new moon, we could see every star that God meant the naked human eye to see in our part of the world. The Milky Way was a white river of light above me and I could lift my hand in front of my face and annihilate half of that river of stars with the palm of my hand. The tide was dropping and the fiddler crabs had arisen from their mud caverns and the males waved their large audacious claws in eerie harmony. They moved their claws in synchronization with the tides and stars and winds. They signaled with their ivory arms that the world was as it was always meant to be. Thousands of them gestured to God that the tides had fallen, that the Pegasi shone with the proper magnitude, that the porpoises were singing of the hunt in the racing waters, that the moon had been faithful to its covenant. This movement was a dance, a trust, a ceremony of divine affirmation. Like a fiddler crab, I lifted my arm and waved to the militant striding Orion who was walking his unhurried gait in full battle array. His belt was millions of miles away from my eyes yet seemed closer than the lights of my house.

  On August third I slept again on the dock as a wind rose in the southeast. By midday the tide was full and when it turned, the winds kept the tides from receding and a titanic struggle ensued. The wind wreaked havoc among the orchards and the rows of beans. After lunch, Luke invited Savannah and me to accompany him to the south end of the island, where he planned to spend the afternoon fertilizing the pecan grove that had not borne fruit for two years. I told my brother cheerfully that I did not care if the pecan trees of Melrose Island did not produce a single nut in the next fifty years, that I did not intend to walk about the island in such peculiar weather. Savannah and I stayed behind with our mother as Luke left the house and walked the back road through the swamp, the wind at his back.

  We listened to a radio station from Georgia and the three of us sang along in a vain attempt to harmonize whenever they played a song we favored. My mother’s favorite song of the summer came on and we sang the words loudly, each of us pretending to croon into invisible microphones for the pleasure of rapturous crowds. When the song ended, we applauded each other and took turns bowing deeply at the waist and throwing kisses to our exalted fans.

  We talked to each other as the news interrupted our recital. The national news shifted indistinguishably into the local news. The Georgia governor had asked the federal government for funds to prevent further erosion on Tybee Beach, and three men had escaped from Reidsville Prison in central Georgia. They were believed to be armed and dangerous and heading for Florida. They had killed a guard at the prison farm during their escape. The Savannah Historical Society had issued a protest over the granting of a permit to a developer for the building of a hotel in the historic district. A man was arrested for selling liquor to a minor in a bar on River Street. My mother’s happy voice and the news of that hour coalesced.

  The rain began as the weather forecaster announced that there was a forty percent chance of rain in the Savannah area that afternoon.

  When the news ended, the sound of the Shirelles came over the radio and my mother squealed and began dancing the Carolina shag with Savannah. Like most high school athletes of my generation, I learned to dive off tackle long before I learned to dance, and I watched their sensuous movements with a feeling of both exhilaration and shame. Some innate shyness had kept me from asking either my sister or my mother to teach me to dance. It embarrassed me to even think of holding their hands. My mother was leading and she spun Savannah around the living room with grace and authority.

  What we did not know was that our house was being watched. In happy innocence, my mother danced with my sister as I sang along with the Shirelles and clapped my hands in rhythm to the music. There was thunder over the river but ours was a house of music and dancing and the soft drumming of rain on the roof. We were about to learn that fear is a dark art that requires a perfect teacher. In blood, we were about to sign our names in the indifferent pages of the book of hours. Our perfect teachers had come. But it all began with music.

  There was a knock at the front door and we glanced at one another because we had not heard a car approach the house. I shrugged my shoulders and went to answer the door.

  I opened the door and felt the cold steel of the gun against my temple. I looked up at the man. He was beardless but I knew his face well. Through the window of time I remembered the cruelty and magnetism of those pale eyes.

  “Callanwolde,” I said, and I heard my mother scream behind me.

  The two other men burst through the back door and again the radio mentioned the three armed men who had escaped from Reidsville Prison and who were believed heading toward Florida. Their names were given. Otis Miller, the one we once called Callanwolde. Floyd Merlin. Randy Thompson. I was overwhelmed by impotence, by fear, by a cowardice so profound that I sank to my knees and cried out in a wordless immolated howl.

  “I never forgot you, Lila,” the giant said. “All those years in prison and you were the one I remembered. I kept this to remind me of you.”

  He held up the soiled fragments of the letter my mother had written in Atlanta to my grandfather during the Korean War, the one that had never been delivered to the island.

  The fat man had Savannah by the throat and was forcing her toward her bedroom door. Savannah was fighting him and screaming, but he grabbed her roughly by the hair and forced her through the door.

  “It’s about time we enjoyed ourselves,” he said, winking to the others as he slammed the door shut.

  “The woman’s mine,” said Callanwolde, staring at my mother with a primitive hunger so concupiscent that it seemed to poison the air in the room.

  “Tom,” my mother said, “please help me.”

  “I can’t, Mama,” I whispered, but I made a sudden lunge for the gun rack against the far wall.

  Callanwolde intercepted me and slapped me to the floor, and as he walked toward my mother with his pistol aimed at her face, he said words I did not understand. “The boy is yours, Randy. He looks pretty good to me.”

  “Raw meat,” Randy said, moving toward me. “Nothing I like better than raw fresh meat.”

  “Tom,” my mother said again, “you’ve got to help me.”

  “I can’t, Mama,” I said, closing my eyes as Randy put a knife to my jugular and Callanwolde shoved my mother through the door and threw her down on the bed where I was conceived.

  Randy cut my shirt off from behind and told me to loosen my belt. Not knowing what he wanted, I undid my belt and my pants fell to the floor. I was from rural South Carolina. I did not know a boy could be raped. But my teacher had come to my house.

  “Nice. Real nice. What’s your name, pretty boy? Tell Randy your name.” And he tightened the blade against my throat as I listened to the screams of my mother and sister echo through the house. His breath smelled acrid and metallic. I felt his lips press against the back of my neck. He sucked on my neck and I felt his free hand stroke my genitalia.

  “Tell me your name, pretty boy, before I cut your fucking pretty throat,” he whispered.

  “Tom,” I said in a voice I did not recognize.

  “You ever had a man before, Tommy?�
�� Randy said, and I heard Savannah weeping in the bedroom. “No, of course not, Tommy. I’ll be your first, Tommy. I’ll fuck you nice, Tommy, before I cut your throat.”

  “Please,” I said as he grabbed my larynx with his left hand and squeezed so hard I thought I would lose consciousness. I felt the blade along my waist as he cut through my underwear. Then he took my hair and forced me to my knees. I did not know what he was doing until I felt his cock against my ass.

  “No,” I begged.

  He pulled my hair back hard and drew blood on my ass with the pressure of his knife and whispered, “I’ll fuck you while you’re bleeding to death, Tommy. It don’t make no difference to me.”

  When he entered me I tried to scream but could not. I could give no voice nor utterance to such degradation, to such profuse shame. His cock was enormous and he damaged me as he forced his way inside. I felt a fluid running down my thigh and thought he had come, but it was my own blood running down my thighs. He writhed and forced it deeper inside me as I listened to my mother and sister calling out my name, begging for my intercession.

  “Tom, Tom,” Savannah cried out in an exhausted voice. “He’s hurting me, Tom.”

  My eyes filled up with tears as he began to ride me hard and whispered, “Tell me you love it, Tommy. Tell me how much you love it.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Then I’ll cut your throat now, Tommy. I’ll come inside your asshole while you’re bleeding to death. Tell me you love it, Tommy.”

  “I love it.”

  “Say it pretty, Tommy.”

  “I love it,” I said prettily.

  My humiliation and powerlessness now complete, I felt a quiet shift in my bloodstream as the man groaned and thrust deep inside me. He did not take notice of that subtle moment when a murderous rage shivered through me. I looked up and tried to clear my head of terror. My eyes went around the room and came to rest on the beveled mirror above the mantelpiece. Framed in that mirror, I saw my brother Luke’s face watching from the south windows. I shook my head and mouthed the word “no.” I knew that all the rifles were in the house and that our best chance lay in Luke’s running for help. When I looked again, Luke was no longer there.