by Pat Conroy
“What is that place you told me about in college, Tom?” Sallie said. “Your daddy used to fish there or something.”
“Marsh Hen Island,” Savannah and I both shouted simultaneously.
When my father was a boy he had been hunting marsh hens in the vast marshes along the Upper Estill River. One of his friends was paddling his small bateau through the marsh grass at high tide, flushing the birds from their hiding places in the lush spartina. He had killed a dozen birds when he saw a modest clump of low-growing trees rise out of the marsh. The water had turned as they paddled toward the small unmarked island and they barely made it to land before they realized they would have to wait for the next tide till they could return to the main channel. They were thirteen miles from the nearest habitation and they had discovered, by accident, one of those secret sanctuaries that provide a sense of rapture and anchorage to a small boy. It was a quarter-acre of uncharted land, a cluster of palmettos and one spindly oak. They had happened upon a failed island marooned in an endless expanse of salt marsh, almost invisible from either land or river. They cleaned the marsh hens and soaked them in seawater. They pitched their tent, made a fire and sautéed onions in three tablespoons of bacon fat, then rolled the birds in flour and fried them until they turned dark as chocolate. They added water to the pan and simmered them slowly until they were tender. They lifted clams out of the exposed mudflats and ate them raw while waiting for the birds to cook. Both boys were convinced they had come to a place where no man had been before them. They claimed the land for themselves and my father and his friends carved their names into the trunk of the oak. Before they left on the next tide, they christened their discovery Marsh Hen Island.
Once, after my grandmother had left Amos and moved to Atlanta, my father ran away from home and his friends found him on Marsh Hen, crying for his lost mother. When the cobia and shad entered the rivers each spring to spawn, my father would spend a week on his island, fishing and crabbing and camping out beneath the stars. I was seven when he first took his three children with him on his annual fishing trip. By then, he had built a small hut to escape the rain. Using a live eel, I caught a thirty-pound cobia that first season, and we set a gill net for shad in the river. For a week, we lived on the steaks of cobia barbecued over a slow fire and pale sacs of shad roe covered with strips of thick bacon. Whenever I thought of my father’s retreat from the world, I envisioned great feasts of seafood and my father’s laughter when he navigated his boat through acres of dense marsh as the tides lifted us up to that inconsequential piece of land that cut us off from the rest of the planet. It was only after my father discovered that his camp ad been used by other fishermen that he ceased his annual pilgrimage to Marsh Hen Island. When it was no longer secret, the island lost its aura of magic—and hence its value. By permitting the incursion of strangers, Marsh Hen Island had betrayed its discoverer. In the bill of particulars of my father’s philosophy, a place could be inviolable only once. He never visited the island again, and sensing something genuine in our father’s disillusionment, neither had his children.
But Savannah and I knew you could live a whole lifetime in Colleton County, spend all your leisure time fishing and crabbing in the most obscure creeks and tributaries, and never once even imagine the existence of that heart-shaped fritter of land embedded like a sapphire in the dead center of the largest salt marsh north of Glynn County, Georgia. The only other people who shared this piece of earned intelligence were my father, my brother, and those anonymous fishermen whose innocent footprints undermined the numinous rarity of my father’s secret hermitage.
On the map, in a thirty-mile swathe of marshland, I marked an X at the spot where I thought Marsh Hen Island might be. I knew it was a misnomer even to call it an island; it was a piece of retreating land in the process of being overwhelmed by the marsh.
On the night before we left for Colleton, I read a bedtime story to the three girls and tucked them in. Sallie left for the late shift at the hospital and Savannah and I made drinks and took them out to the front porch. The lights of Charleston were wreathed across the harbor in the soft haze. My mother had eaten dinner with us that evening and the tension had been unbearable. She blamed my father and us for Luke’s defection. She told us that Reese had offered to hire the finest lawyers in South Carolina for Luke’s defense and was furious when Savannah hinted that such an arrangement might not meet with Luke’s approval. My mother could not recognize that Reese Newbury had mastered the abstruse art of humiliation by kindness. We took no pleasure in the fact that our mother was crying when she left the house.
“I think Mom will be the real tragic figure in all this, no matter what happens to Luke,” Savannah said as we stared out toward Fort Sumter.
“She deserves to be,” I said. “She didn’t act in good faith.”
“You don’t know how difficult it is to be a woman,” Savannah said sharply. “After the life she led, anything she does is fine with me.”
“Then why do you act like you hate her guts when she’s around you, Savannah?” I asked. “Why can’t you speak a civil word to her or make her feel genuinely loved for even a single moment when she’s in your presence?”
“Because she’s my mother and it’s a natural law and a sign of mental health when any woman can summon enough strength to hate her mother,” she answered. “My analyst says it’s an important stage for me to work through.”
“Your analyst!” I said. “How many shrinks, analysts, therapists, and meatballs have you been to since you left South Carolina?”
“I’m trying to have a life, Tom,” she said, hurt. “You have no right to undermine my therapy.”
“Has there ever been anyone who lived in New York City who didn’t see a therapist?” I asked. “I mean, there must have been some poor schnook who changed planes at La Guardia who didn’t have time to make it to the Upper East Side for a fifty-minute session.”
“You need a therapist more than anybody I ever met,” she said. “If you could only hear your voice. If you only knew how angry you sound.”
“I don’t know how to deal with someone I love who has all the answers,” I said. “Mom has all the answers and you have all the answers and it seems like an endemic disease with all the women in this family. Don’t you ever find yourself plagued with doubts?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have great doubts about you, Tom. I’ve got serious doubts about the choices you’ve made in your life. I don’t see any direction to your life. I see no ambition, no desire to change and take chances. I see you floating along, slightly detached from your wife and children, slightly alienated from your job, not knowing what you want or where you want to go.”
“That’s what makes me an American, Savannah,” I said. “There’s nothing rare about that.”
“You come home after coaching, make yourself a drink, and sit in front of the television set until you’re tired enough or drunk enough to go to sleep,” she said. “You don’t read books, you don’t have conversations, you only vegetate.”
“I’m having a conversation right now,” I said. “This is why I hate conversations.”
“You hate looking at yourself, Tom,” said Savannah, reaching over and squeezing my arm.
“You’re smack in the middle of living an unexamined life and it’s going to catch up to you. That’s what I’m worried about.”
“Why do you force an admission of insanity and unhappiness out of everyone you meet?” I asked. “Why is craziness the only response to the world you recognize as valid?”
“I’ve heard rumors about people who are mentally healthy, but I’ve never met any members of the tribe up close,” she answered. “They’re like Incas. You can read about them and study their ruins but you can never interview any of them personally to see what makes them tick.”
“Savannah,” I said, “they’re going to kill Luke if we don’t find him. And if they kill Luke, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
“Then we’ll f
ind him and bring him back,” she said.
“They’ve hired men to hunt him down like he was a deer or something,” I said.
She said, “I’m more afraid for them than I am for Luke. You and I both know how capable he is in the woods. Everything’s always worked out for Luke. I think if he’d failed just once, he wouldn’t be out there now. If we’d gotten caught when we rescued the porpoise. If we hadn’t been able to put the loggerhead in the Newbury’s bed. If Luke hadn’t been able to swim with the body of his CO out of North Vietnam. He always has faith that it’ll work out for him and he’s always been right.”
“But this is senseless,” I said. “He has no chance of achieving anything.”
“He’s certainly gotten their attention, Tom,” she said. “Do you think about him often?”
“I try not to,” I said. “I try not to think about Luke or Dad at all. There are times when I pretend that neither one of them has ever been a part of my life.”
“The old Mom technique,” Savannah said, laughing. “Truth is only what you choose to remember.”
“I write to Dad once a week. It’s like writing a pen pal from Estonia, some stranger I never met. He writes very loving and very intelligent letters in return. How can I relate to a loving father? It’s even more difficult to relate to an intelligent one. We’ve almost established a friendship through the mail. Yet when I think of our childhood, I feel the greatest tenderness and gratitude toward Mom. I fill up absolutely with love for her and yet I can hardly bear to be around her now. The thing with Luke is killing her and I can’t help her with it at all.”
“Why are you so mad at Luke?”
“Because I think he’s an idiot,” I said. “Because I think he is egomaniacal, inflexible, and selfish. But there’s something else, Savannah, that I don’t understand. I’ve envied him his freedom to step out in the full fury of his beliefs armed with a passion that I’ll never know or reel. I’m jealous that Luke can alarm the whole countryside by that cold, unknowable rapture he brings to every article of his simple goddamn faith. The reason I need to stop him, Savannah, is because, in the deepest part of me, I believe in the rectitude of his private war with the world. Because I believe it so deeply, his sense of engagement is a constant reminder of how much I’ve surrendered. I’ve been tamed by mortgages, car payments, lesson plans, children, and a wife with more compelling dreams and ambitions than my own. I’m living out my life in a bedroom community watching the seven o’clock news and doing the daily crossword puzzle while my. brother eats raw fish and wages a war of resistance against an army of occupation who stole the only home we ever knew. I’m not a fanatic or a saboteur, I tell myself. I’m a good citizen, I tell myself. I have duties and responsibilities, I tell myself. But Luke has proven something to me. I’m not a man of principle, I’m not a man of faith, and I’m not a man of action. I have the soul of a collaborator. A Vichy government has set up headquarters in that soul. I’ve become exactly the kind of man I hate more than anything in the world. I keep a nice lawn and I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket.”
“I think of Luke as a modern-day equivalent of Don Quixote,” Savannah said. “I want to write a long poem about all this.”
“I’m sure he thinks of himself in exactly the same terms,” I said. “But I don’t see how it’s helped him or anyone else at all. Four men are dead because of Luke and no matter how hard I try to rationalize it, murder just doesn’t appeal to me.”
“He didn’t murder those men,” she said. “That was an accident.”
“Would you like to explain that to their wives and children?” I asked.
“You’re a sentimentalist, Tom,” Savannah said.
“I imagine their wives and children are, too,” I said.
“Luke is not a murderer,” Savannah said to me.
“Then what the hell is he, Savannah?”
“He’s an artist and a completely free man,” she answered. “Two things you’ll never understand.”
We had waited for a calm night and a moon that would help us navigate. At the Charleston marina, Sallie kissed both me and Savannah and wished us good luck as we embarked for Colleton.
“Bring Luke back safely,” Sallie said. “Tell him that he’s deeply loved by a great many people and that the girls need an uncle.”
“I will, Sallie,” I said, holding her. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be.”
“You’ve got all summer,” she replied. “My mama’s coming down tomorrow to help with the kids. Lila’s going to take them up to Pawleys Island next month. I’ll be working my ass off saving lives and doing good for humanity.”
“Say a prayer for us, Sallie,” Savannah said as I started the engine and moved the boat out into the Ashley River. “And say one for Luke.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said to Savannah as we moved slowly past the Coast Guard base at the end of the Charleston peninsula.
“I don’t,” Savannah answered, “but I believe in Luke and he believes in God and I always believe in God when I truly need him.”
“Situational faith,” I said.
“You got it, buster,” she answered happily. “Isn’t this wonderful, Tom? We’re in another adventure together. It’s just like the time we went to Miami to rescue the white porpoise. We’re going to find Luke. I can feel it. I can feel it in my bones. Look up above us, Tom.”
I looked in the direction she was pointing in the sky and said, “Orion, the Hunter.”
“No,” she answered. “I’ve got to teach you to think like a poet, Tom. That’s the reflection of Luke hiding in the lowcountry.”
“Savannah, I might puke if you keep referring to Luke as the subject of your future poems,” I said. “We’re not in the middle of a poem. This is a journey—a last chance to save our brother.”
“It’s an odyssey,” she said, teasing me.
“There’s a difference between life and art, Savannah,” I said as we moved out into Charleston Harbor.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’ve always been wrong about that.”
I guided the boat past the lights of Mount Pleasant, the solitary shadows of Fort Sumter, the lights of my house on Sullivans Island, past lighthouses and the low-throttled murmur of the harbor pilot’s boat rendezvousing with a freighter from Panama. As I moved the boat through the breakwaters, with James Island on my starboard side, moonlight infused the tassels of sea oats shimmering on the tide-stuck dunes. The waves, inlaid with phosphorus and plankton, fell in soft wings against the bow. The sea flittered and the air was strange as milk. The raw smell of childbirth rose out of the marsh as we approached the windless sea on a night without small craft advisories for five hundred miles. We left the lassitude of barrier islands and entered the soft eye of the Atlantic freckled with stars, and the moon lay against the waters in a stole of bright ermine.
I headed the boat straight out toward the Gulf Stream, out toward Bermuda, east toward Africa, until I could no longer see the lights of South Carolina behind me. Then I turned the boat due south and set a course toward the country of my birth and said a prayer that I could deliver my brother from the tyranny of an absolute vision. I prayed that I could teach him the art of compromise and genuflection to higher authority. I prayed that I could teach him not to be Luke, that I could tame him and make him more like Tom.
Savannah and I held hands as I urged the boat toward Colleton and the wind lifted my sister’s hair like a veil. For two hours, I watched the stars and the compass until I saw the blinking green channel marker that indicated the entrance to Colleton Sound. As trespassers, we entered the forbidden waters where we had first drawn breath during the hurricane of 1944.
It was just after midnight at mean low tide when we dropped anchor on the leeward side of Kenesaw Island and waited for the tides to change again. We reckoned we would need at least two feet of rising water to make the approach to Marsh Hen Island. When the tide did change, we could feel the boat strain against the anchor line
. At three in the morning, I started the motor and slowly began to navigate through the most obscure creeks in the county. The hum of the boat seemed an obscene intervention in the complete silence that engulfed us. It took us an hour before we reached the vast stretch of salt marsh that held Marsh Hen Island in its secret center. I tried three small creeks that led to dead ends. I had to return to the river to get my bearings, then start out again. We followed two more inconsequential ribbons of water that ambled off into the great marsh with the same result. As we traveled below the marsh, the spartina formed impenetrable walls of grass on both sides of us, making it impossible to get our true heading. It was not until full high tide with the sun rising in the east and at our moment of profoundest despair that we ran into a creek I thought we had explored before and almost ran aground on the island we were searching for.
As I lifted the motor out of the water, Savannah sprang onto the bow and stepped out onto dry land. I locked the motor in place and heard Savannah say in the darkness behind me, “He’s been here, Tom. Jesus Christ, has he been here.”
“We need to hide the boat, Savannah,” I said. “We can’t let them spot us from the air.”
“He’s made it easy for us,” she answered.
Beneath the wind-stunted oak and the dense grove of palmettos, Savannah stood at the center of Luke’s base of operations. He had placed camouflage netting in the trees and beneath the netting had erected a large waterproof tent. We found boxes of dynamite covered with oilskin and drums of gasoline. There were rifles, boxes of ammunition, and cases of she-crab soup manufactured by the Blue Channel Corporation. There was a small sailboat and a small bateau with an eight horsepower engine. Savannah found thirty-one gallon jugs filled with fresh water.
Luke had restored the small fishing lodge my father had built. He had put on a new roof and replaced the floorboards that had rotted away. His sleeping bag was in the corner and there was a wooden chair and table in the middle of the room. A half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey stood on the table beside a place setting for one. Beside the plate was a copy of The Shrimper’s Daughter inscribed to Luke.