by Pat Conroy
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Tom,” she said coolly.
“It looks from all the green pins in that map of Colleton County that Reese has succeeded in buying up most of the county,” I said.
“Everyone knows he’s the largest landowner in Colleton,” she said with a strange misplaced pride.
“Tell Reese I think it’s a bit tacky for him to put a green pin on our island before he owns it, Mom,” I said, pointing to the map. “And I find it troublesome that you’re talking about giving away our island before it’s even legally yours. Because if you get the island, Mama, it means Reese Newbury has to steal it for you. And we know, Mama, that in this town he can do it. He’s got more toadies around him than a country pond and half of them are the judges in this town.”
“I don’t care a single thing for that island,” she said. “I almost died of loneliness out there and I’ll be glad never to step foot on it again.”
“Dad only knew how to abuse power,” I said. “I don’t want you to make that same mistake.”
“My only mistake in life is that I’ve been far too kind to everyone,” she said.
“That’s funny,” I replied. “That’s what Dad said.”
“In my case,” she said, “it happens to be true.”
“Mom,” I said, rising to go, “for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing. He was never the proper man for you.”
“I think I could have been the First Lady,” she said, apropos of nothing at all.
“What?” I answered.
“I simply feel that I have all the qualities that would make a dignified and worthy First Lady of our country. I think I would have been an asset as the helpmate of the president or perhaps a governor. I have a real talent for entertaining that no one knows about. And I love to meet the people who count. I sometimes think of all I could have been if I hadn’t met your father in Atlanta that day.”
“I’m not going to take sides in this, Mama,” I said as I moved toward the door. “I know that both of you will probably hate me for it, but that’s the way I’m going to play it.”
“You’re a loser, Tom,” my mother said sadly as we kissed farewell. “You’re a loser just like your father. For years, I fooled myself and said that you were the most like me. You had such potential.”
“Who’s most like you now?” I asked.
“Luke,” she said. “He fights for what he wants. He’s a born fighter, just like his mother.”
Having finished my business, I rose to leave, and my mother said, “Please don’t repeat what Isabel told you tonight, Tom. No one should be held accountable for what they say when they’re dying.”
“I won’t say anything, Mama,” I promised as we walked to the door.
I kissed my mother in the front hallway and then held her at arm’s length and studied her. Her beauty touched me deeply. It made me proud to be her son. It caused me to worry about her future.
“Look,” she said, and she took me into the living room and whispered. “There are eight museum-quality pieces in this living room. Eight!”
“It makes it kind of hard to relax in here, doesn’t it?” I said.
“I’m worried about your father,” she said, suddenly. “I’m afraid he’ll hurt me if I go through with the divorce.”
“He won’t hurt you, Mom,” I said. “I promise you that.”
“How can you be so sure?” she asked.
“Because Luke and I would kill him if he ever laid a hand on you,” I said. “You don’t ever have to worry about that again, Mama. Luke and I aren’t little boys anymore.”
But my mother was not listening to me. Her eyes were shining with pleasure and they engaged in a slow inventory of all the items in the living room.
“Do you want to try to guess which of the eight pieces are museum quality, Tom?” she asked as I left the Newbury house.
Isabel Newbury died in her sleep after a period of intense suffering. My mother sat with the family at the funeral.
My father contested the divorce on the novel grounds that he was a Catholic and that the Catholic Church did not believe in divorce. The sovereign state of South Carolina, however, did. Savannah arrived from New York the day before the trial to prepare for her role as my mother’s star witness.
Savannah wept during her entire testimony, as did Lila and Henry Wingo. Judge Cavender was a long-time business associate of Reese Newbury’s. There was sadness but there were no surprises during the trial. My mother and father drifted by each other in the corridors of the courthouse without the slightest sign of recognition passing between them. Already, they had begun the cold business of dissolving into strangers when the other came into view. Their history was like a child found murdered in the snow. The trial was a deathwatch, an abstraction, and the emblems of their disaffection were their three children who watched in agony as they sundered the marriage that we all agreed was terrible. Henry Wingo’s fists and temper were nothing before the fluent contempt that the law accorded to husbands who abused their wives. On the witness stand, my father whined and lied and tried to flatter the judge. He was very human and his performance broke my heart. My mother was lovely and controlled and decent. But there was something artificial and unpersuaded in her voice. She seemed to deliver her lines to a secret listener at the window instead of directing her statements to the lawyers or Judge Cavender.
The judge immediately granted the divorce after all the testimony was heard. Then he divided the property. Henry Wingo retained possession of the shrimp boat, the house and furniture on the island, all monies in savings and checking accounts, all motor vehicles and farm equipment, and all liquid assets of any kind. My father was not required to pay a penny of alimony, nor would he be held responsible for any debts my mother had accrued since she had moved out of my father’s house. Just when it seemed the judge had left my mother destitute, he issued the final and most amazing portion of the settlement.
He granted to my mother sole and exclusive possession of Melrose Island.
A year later my mother married Reese Newbury in a private ceremony conducted by the governor of South Carolina. The same week she attended her first session as a member in good standing of the Colleton League.
On the morning of her remarriage, my father guided his shrimp boat out beyond the three-mile limit and turned south toward Florida. For six months we did not hear a word from him until Luke received a postcard from Key West. He said he was catching a ton of shrimp and had finally figured out a way to make some real money. He did not mention our mother or let us know when we might see him again. He was on the high seas, west of Jamaica, when agents of the federal government finally announced their plans for Colleton County.
In Columbia, at a news conference in the governor’s mansion attended by Reese Newbury and my mother, the United States Atomic Energy Commission announced that its new production plants were to be designed, built, and operated by the Y. G. Mewshaw Company of Baltimore, Maryland, and would be located within the designated borders of Colleton County, South Carolina. The entire county would be acquired for the site, which would be known henceforth as the Colleton River Project. The purpose of these new plants would be the manufacture of materials that could be used either for the production of nuclear weapons or as fuels essential for the operation of nuclear power plants. The Congress of the United States had appropriated $875 million to start construction.
A spokesman for the commission said the site had been selected after an exhaustive study of more than three hundred sites around the continental United States. He also emphasized that to make way for the plants and the required safety zone, it would be imperative for about thirty-four hundred families to relocate in the next year and a half. The federal and state agricultural agencies were organizing to give assistance to the families forced to relocate. With the moving of the town of Colleton, it was the first time in the history of the republic that an incorporated community had been taken over by the federal gover
nment. The plants would be operational within three years and pretty Colleton would lead the world in the production of plutonium and would produce more hydrogen bombs than any place outside of the Soviet Union.
“I don’t mind giving up my hometown to save my country from the Russian Communists,” Reese Newbury said before the television cameras.
The government ballyhooed the project as the largest, most expensive enterprise ever undertaken by the federal government south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It would bring billions of dollars into the economy of lower South Carolina and would provide jobs from Charleston to Savannah. By right of eminent domain, the United States government claimed all land within the borders of Colleton County, which they emphasized was the poorest and most sparsely populated county in the state. The government would send agents to the county to appraise the worth of the land and to purchase it from the property owners at its fair market value. The government commissioned a special appeals court to adjudicate disputes between the appraisers and the landowners. The government also promised to move any houses at government expense to any piece of property within two hundred miles of Colleton.
Since it was recognized that Colleton had some historical significance, the government wanted to keep as much of the town intact as possible and had begun to clear four thousand acres in southern Charleston County. The town would be called New Colleton and the land would be free to the disenfranchised citizens of “old” Colleton. The newspapers around the state began to speak of Colleton in the past tense. Editorials applauded the government’s decision to locate such a huge complex in South Carolina and praised the people of Colleton for their sacrifice in the interest of national defense. Every politician in the state threw his fervent support behind the project. It was a time of the most bilious platitudes and embroidered lies. The mayor of Colleton supported the Colleton River Project fully. So did the city council. So did every local government official in the county. Reese Newbury had tipped off each of them before the announcement was made and all of them had speculated heavily in tracts of available land throughout the county.
There were town meetings with furious exchanges between town officials and private citizens but the awful machinery of government had been set in motion and we could not even slow the pace of the juggernaut as it rolled across our county. Natives of Colleton wrote letters of protest to newspapers, and their congressman. But everyone in power could see past the temporal loss of a pretty backwater town to the time when Colleton County would support a teeming array of skilled workers and scientists. Only eighty-two hundred people would lose their homes in the displacement and the government was promising to be both solicitous and generous in helping the people of Colleton make the transition. There was no vote, no referendum, no private poll of the citizenry. We had awakened one morning to find out that our town would vanish without a trace in the dunes of memory. There was no way to reverse the decision since we were denied any redress of grievance if we refused to accept the government’s basic premise—that Colleton had to be moved in the sacrosanct name of progress.
The government held one meeting and one meeting only to explain to the people of Colleton how the diaspora would work. It was held in the gynmasium of the high school in the debilitating heat of August. The crowd overflowed out into the street and loudspeakers were set up so the people who stood outside could hear. A federal agent who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission would deliver the speech and answer all questions. His name was Patrick Flaherty and he was slim, handsome, and tidy of manner. He gave the appearance of being untouchable and fastidious. He spoke with an unaccented atonal voice. In the province of law, he represented government, science, the strangers who were entering the county in staunchless floods, and all the disfigured mottoes and brutalized language used to soften the fact that they were killing our town.
Patrick Flaherty was the perfect manifestation of the modern American man. I listened in amazement as he began to speak, anesthetized by his heroic, unblemishable command of every cliché in the language. His tongue was a hermitage for banality. Every movement he made and every word he spoke was buttery with condescension. He was the quintessential organization man and all his i’s were dotted and all his sentences were diagrammed by a portentous vacuity. Clean and supple and lacking in all vestiges of compassion, Patrick Flaherty stood before us as an eyesore on our aberrant, hallucinating century. His voice flooded the gymnasium with a whole lottery of statistics. It was a coppery, inanimate voice and all the words seemed dusted with bright and deadly motes of silica. In silence, we listened as he explained how our town was going to be moved house by house and brick by brick.
Then he said, in closing, “I want to say that I think the people of Colleton are the luckiest people in the United States. You have a chance to prove your patriotism to the whole world and you’re doing it with the knowledge that America will be safer because of your sacrifice. America needs plutonium and it needs nuclear submarines and it needs MIRV missiles because America loves peace. You can spell plutonium P-E-A-C-E. We know that many of you are sorry to leave your homes, and, believe me, there’s no one involved in this project who doesn’t feel for you good folks. It gets me right here in the gut. I can tell you that much. But we know that as much as you love Colleton, you love America even more. And, folks, if you think you love Colleton, just wait and see what we have in store for you in New Colleton. A new fire station, courthouse, police station, schools, parks. We promise that New Colleton will be one of the most beautiful communities in America when we’re finished. If you love the old ancestral home, then we’ll be glad to move it up to New Colleton at our expense. We’re here to make you folks happy. Because when America needed a hand, you folks stood up for America by saying yes to the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program of the Atomic Energy Commission. I think all of you should get up and give yourselves a standing ovation.”
No one moved. There was not a sound in the gymnasium except for that of Patrick Flaherty clapping alone.
Unnerved by the silence, Flaherty asked if there was anyone in Colleton who had something to say to his fellow citizens.
My brother Luke rose up beside me and walked the full length of that gymnasium with the eyes of the town upon him. He created a field of disturbance in his passage. He moved with a supple intensity and his face wore the dark, lacquered expressiveness of a sublime wound to the spirit. When he stood before the microphone, he did not acknowledge the presence of the politicians behind him. He gave no sign of recognition to his mother, who sat on the raised platform with the other guests of honor. Carefully, he spread out three sheets of yellow paper on the rostrum before him. Then he spoke.
“When I fought in Asia, they sent me to Japan for R and R. I visited two cities there—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I talked to folks lucky enough to have seen Atoms for Peace in action. I talked to people who had been present in those cities when those two bombs were dropped in 1945. One man showed me a picture of a baby girl being eaten by a starving dog in the ruins. I saw women with hideous scars. I went to a museum in Hiroshima and it made me sick to my stomach to be an American. Plutonium has nothing to do with peace. It is a code word for the Apocalypse, for the Beast of Zion. It will do for the whole world what it’s now doing for Colleton alone. Soon they will turn our beautiful town into a place dedicated to the destruction of the universe. And I have not heard a single man or woman from this town say ‘No.’ I keep asking myself, ‘How many sheep can one town produce?’ I keep asking myself, ‘Where are the lions? Where are they sleeping?’
“Since the announcement by the federal government that they were going to steal my town, I’ve done what any southerner would do: I’ve turned to the Bible for solace and strength. I’ve tried to find in the Bible some message that would give me comfort during this time of distress. I’ve looked to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to see if I could find some comparison between those two wicked cities and Colleton. Now, I admit to you I found nothing. Colleton is a town of gardens and pleas
ure boats and church bells on Sunday. It is not evil in any way that I can judge evil. Its only fault that I can see is that it produced people who didn’t love her enough, people who would sell her to strangers for thirty pieces of silver. So I kept reading the Bible, hoping to find a message from God that would grant me succor during the wrath of the Philistines. Because, if I don’t try to save the one town in the world I truly love, then I want God to turn me into a pillar of salt because I did not look back. I would rather be a lifeless pillar of salt in Colleton than a Judas Iscariot covered with gold and the blood of his hometown anywhere else in the world.”
As Luke spoke, you could feel the voiceless conscience of the town rising from the dead. You could hear the murmur of insurgency purling through the humming crowd. His voice set off a chime of coalition resonating through the breasts of every man, woman, and child who could be touched by a passionate cry of home. The very gentleness of his voice was an indictment against the lethargy that had fallen on the town like some insensible dust. When he invoked the name of Iscariot you could feel the hardening, the unhiving, and the exhilarated clarity that rises from the fires of dissent.
“I could not find what I wanted from the Bible until I started over at the beginning. Then I heard God speaking to me in a voice I could understand and obey. Many of you believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible. I also believe in the literal interpretation of God’s Word. But all of us know there are two kinds of ways that God speaks to us in the Bible and we have to distinguish between the two of them. There are books of revelation and books of prophecy. The books of revelation are those that tell us about historical occurrences like the birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and death on the cross. The Book of Revelation itself is a work of prophecy in which the evangelist predicts the Final Judgment and the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. None of these things have come to pass, but we know they will come to pass because it is written in the name of the Lord.