The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “Luke always did have good taste in literature,” said Savannah.

  “I’m surprised he’s not reading Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book,” I said.

  “He doesn’t need to,” she said. “He’s living it.”

  We unloaded the boat quickly, then dragged it into the camouflaged tent. Dawn approached through the marsh in curling foils of gold. The tide kept rising, erasing the deep scar in the soft earth left by the keel of the boat. We placed our own sleeping bags beside Luke’s and I brewed us coffee on a Coleman stove when the sun had fully risen.

  “He hasn’t been here in a while,” I said.

  “Where would you have looked if he hadn’t been here?” Savannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “This seemed like it had to be the place. Colleton is a lousy place to run a guerrilla war. It’s too easy to get trapped on one of these islands.”

  “He seems to be doing all right,” she said.

  “The FBI agent, Covington, told me that they thought they had him captured last week. They had him cornered up above the site of the town and had a hundred men and six bloodhounds trying to flush him out of the woods.”

  “How did he get away?” she asked.

  “It was nighttime. He doesn’t fart unless the sun is down. Covington thinks they didn’t move fast enough. He thinks Luke made it to the marsh, crawled to the river, and then let the tides take him. They had boats positioned in the river, but he avoided them.”

  “Good for him. I always love movies where the good guy gets away,” she said.

  “There’s some dispute about who the good guys really are,” I said. “He set off a stick of dynamite in the darkness when it appeared they were getting too close. It unnerved the dogs and made the pursuers edgy.”

  “Did he hurt anyone?” she asked.

  “He turned a cottonwood tree into pick-up sticks, but miraculously, no one was injured,” I said.

  “What are you going to say to Luke when he comes here, Tom?” she said as I handed her a cup of coffee. “Since you know he believes in what he’s doing, since you know he thinks he’s doing both the moral and the correct thing, the only thing that means anything to him, what are you going to tell him to make him give up the fight?”

  “I’m going to describe in great detail how upset you and I are going to be at his funeral. I’m going to talk about the wife he’s not met and the children he’s not going to have and the life he’ll forfeit if he persists in this senseless bullshit,” I said.

  “Luke’s never even had a girlfriend,” said Savannah. “I don’t see how all this talk of a wife, a roaring fire, a pair of slippers, and a couple of towheaded kids is going to flush him out of these woods. To some of us, Tom, the middle-class life in America is a death sentence.”

  “You mean my life’s a death sentence, Savannah?” I said.

  “It would be for me, Tom,” she said. “And I think it might be for Luke. Look, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings . . . ”

  “Thank God, Savannah,” I said. “I can’t even imagine the brutality if you actually set out to hurt my feelings. But we Americans who’re living out our middle-class death sentences and are dull and desensitized survive and we don’t hurt easily.”

  “Touchy, touchy,” she said.

  “I reserve the right to be touchy when someone refers to me as the living dead,” I said.

  “It’s not my fault that you’re unhappy with your life,” she said.

  “It’s your condescension I find so difficult to bear, Savannah,” I said. “It’s that maddening air of superiority you assume when you discuss the various choices we’ve all made. It’s the New York disease you’ve picked up while congratulating other emigrants from small towns who’ve wended their joyous way to Manhattan.”

  “I have to be honest with you,” she said. “The best and the brightest southerners I know all have found themselves in New York City. The South requires that you give up too much of what you really are to even consider living here.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t, Tom,” she answered. “The subject must be very painful to you.”

  “It’s not painful at all,” I shot back. “I just can’t bear your aura of self-congratulation. I find you full of shit on this subject and I find you a bit mean.”

  “How am I mean?”

  “You enjoy telling me that I’m wasting my life,” I said.

  “I don’t enjoy that, Tom,” she said quietly. “It hurts me very much to say that. I just want you and Luke to have everything in the world, to be open to everything, not to let them steal your souls and make southerners out of you.”

  “See that sun, Savannah?” I said, pointing across the marsh. “That’s a Carolina sun and it southern-fried the three of us, and I don’t care how long you live in New York, that stuff just don’t wash out.”

  “We’re talking about something else now,” Savannah said. “I worry that the South will bleed out all that’s rare about you. I’m afraid it will kill Luke because he’s been seduced by a vision of the South as some fatal paradise.”

  “When Luke comes, Savannah,” I said, “please help me talk him into going back with us. Don’t let him talk you into seeing his point of view. He makes a powerful case and it’s romantic as hell. Luke’s a terrific fanatic. He glows with this goddamn romantic inner light and his eyes get funny and he doesn’t want to entertain opposing arguments. The poet in you is going to love the guerrilla in Luke.”

  “I’m here to help you, Tom,” she said. “I’m here to help bring Luke back home.”

  “He’s going to tell you that he is at home,” I said.

  “He’ll have a hell of a point, won’t he, Tom?” Savannah said, reaching for the coffee pot.

  “He sure will, Savannah,” I admitted.

  “I won’t play my role of New York critic anymore,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

  “And I won’t play redneck anymore,” I said. “That’s also a promise.”

  We shook hands and began the long business of waiting for Luke.

  For a week Savannah and I lived alone in the center of the great salt marsh. We spent the time renewing those fragile, tenuous bonds that are both the conundrum and the glory of facing the world as twins. By day, we remained hidden inside the hut and we passed the time telling and retelling the stories of our life as a family. We told every story we could remember about our early childhood and we tried to assess the damages and the strengths we brought to our adult life after being raised by Henry and Lila Wingo. Our life in the house by the river had been dangerous and harmful, yet both of us had found it somehow magnificent. It had produced extraordinary and somewhat strange children. The house had been the breeding ground of madness, poetry, courage, and an ineffable loyalty. Our childhood had been harsh but also relentlessly interesting. Though we could draw up passionate indictments against both of our parents, their particularity had indemnified our souls against the wages of tedium and ennui. To our surprise, Savannah and I agreed that we had been born to the worst possible parents but we would have it no other way. On Marsh Hen Island while waiting for Luke, I think we began to forgive our parents for being exactly what they were meant to be. We would begin our talks with memories of brutality or treachery and end them by affirming over and over again our troubled but authentic love of Henry and Lila. At last, we were old enough to forgive them for not having been born perfect.

  At night, Savannah and I would take turns hurling the cast net into the rising tides. I would watch her toss the net, see the wide spread of its circular shadow as it billowed out in a perfect circle, and hear the weights splash against the dark waters like the entry of some great unseen fish. Shrimp danced across the top of the water in skittering thousands. We caught more shrimp than we could ever eat. I cooked fabulous meals and we took infinite pleasure in eating them. I caught a ten-pound sea bass and stuffed it with shrimp and fresh crabmeat, then cooked it over slo
w coals. At breakfast, I mulled shrimp in bacon fat, made red-eye gravy, and poured the shrimp and gravy over a plate of grits.

  Before we went to bed, we would sit beneath the stars drinking French wines as Savannah recited from memory every poem she had ever written. Most of them were love songs to the lowcountry and she did honor to the language as her words floated above the marsh like butterflies, silver-winged and distracted, feeding on secret nectars born of time and starlight and winds from the Atlantic. When she wrote her poetry about the Carolinas, Savannah brought instant authority to her words by the correct naming of things. Her poems were full of tanagers and grosbeaks, not just birds. She had carried from this land a vast treasury of exact names to her task. She praised hummingbird moths for the happy genius of their mimicry, lavished affection on mockingbirds for their virtuosity, could name every conceivable variety of marine life a shrimp net could sweep from a river channel, and knew thirty discrete varieties of carnations and roses. Her knowledge of the lowcountry was innate and showy. It had accrued to her naturally like the lightening of a beachcomber’s hair in summer. In her poetry, she flung roses into the burning tides of our shared history. When there were no roses to be thrown, she brought forward the disturbed angels of nightmare who sang the canticles of knives and the blue vulnerable veins in her pale wrists. As with all the fine women poets of our century, her own screams and wounds sustained the imperishable beauty of her art.

  Sitting in the darkness, she would recite some of her poems with tears streaming down her face.

  “Don’t recite the ones that make you sad, Savannah,” I said, holding her.

  “They’re the only ones that are worth a damn,” she answered.

  “You ought to write poems about a totally wonderful subject, one that would bring joy and happiness to all the world,” I advised her. “You ought to write poems about me.”

  “I’m writing some New York poems,” she said.

  “There’s a real upbeat topic,” I said.

  “No more Mr. Redneck,” she warned. “You promised. Is it because I love New York so much that you hate it?”

  “I don’t know, Savannah,” I said, listening to the cicadas singing to each other from island to island. “I grew up in a town of six thousand people and I wasn’t even the most interesting person in that town. Hell, I wasn’t even the most interesting person in my own family. I wasn’t prepared for a city of eight million people. I’ve gone into phone booths up there and dialed up operators who had better personalities than I have. I don’t like cities that roar down at me, ‘You ain’t shit, Wingo,’ when I’m just on my way to get a pastrami sandwich. There’s too much of too much up there, Savannah. I can adapt myself to anything, I think, except the titanic and the colossal. This doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  “But it’s such a predictable response for a provincial,” she said. “That’s what worries me. You’ve never been predictable.”

  “Untrue, beloved sister,” I said. “You must remember our mutually shared roots. Our father is a southern cliché. Our mother is a southern cliché honed to the point of either genius or parody. Luke is a southern cliché. Hell, Luke has goddamn seceded from the Union. I’m a total cliché. There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue. I got my feet nailed to the red clay but I get to eat all the barbecue I want. You got the wings, Savannah. And it’s been one of life’s pleasures to see you take to the fucking sky.”

  “But the cost, Tom?” she said.

  “Think of the cost if you’d stayed in Colleton,” I said.

  “I’d be dead,” she said. “The South kills women like me.”

  “That’s why we ship you ol’ gals up to Manhattan,” I said. “It cuts down on burial costs.”

  “The first poem in the New York cycle is called ‘Etude: Sheridan Square,’ ” she announced, and her voice again tossed anapests into the night.

  During the day we kept out of sight and Savannah worked obsessively on her journal. She recorded every story I told about our childhood and it was at this time I first became aware of huge, unbridgeable gaps in her memory of our life in Colleton. Repression was both a great theme and a burden of her life. Her madness was a ruthless censor; it was not content only to ruin the quality of her daily life in New York, but it also effaced the past and replaced it with the white baffled noise of forgetfulness. Her journals preserved the particulars of her life. She filled them with hard facts and nothing else. They were her rose windows into the past. Writing in her journals was but one other technique Savannah had devised to save her own life.

  Each Christmas since I had left college, Savannah had sent me one of the same beautiful leather journals she used herself and encouraged me to record the details of my life every day. The trim brown volumes lined a shelf above my desk at home, remarkable only because I had never made a single entry or written down a random thought. In my own book of life, for reasons unclear to me, I never broke the vow of silence. I owned an accusatory shelf of journals that revealed nothing at all about my interior existence. I had a gift for self-criticism, yet I thought there was the most unforgivable vainglory in the history of my own deficiencies. Knowing that I could cheerfully tally my faults all day long did not diminish the fact that I could never erase that special sense of self-congratulation I would bring to the task. I told myself I would write in my journals only when I had something interesting and original to say. I did not wish merely to be the biographer of my own failure. I wanted to say something. Those empty volumes were an eloquent metaphor of my life as a man. I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

  On the sixth night we spent on the island, we bathed in the creek when the tide rushed in at midnight. We swam out into the marsh and soaped down our naked bodies, feeling the tide move through our hair. The water was moon-ruled and brilliant. Aloud, we wondered how long we could afford to wait for Luke before we had to return to Charleston for supplies. We dried off in the hut and poured ourselves a glass of cognac before we went to sleep. Savannah sprayed the inside of the hut with insecticide and I passed the bottle of bug repellent to her after I had slicked my own body down. The mosquitoes had kept this from being a perfect vacation. We gave enough blood to the mosquitoes that week to satisfy the demands of a small chapter of the Red Cross. Savannah decided the world would be a finer place if mosquitoes tasted as good as shrimp and could be harvested by a boat pulling a net. A cool wind was rising out of the west as we went to sleep.

  I awoke with a rifle barrel against my throat. Then a pencil point of light blinded me as I lifted up out of my sleeping bag.

  Then I heard Luke laughing.

  “Che Guevara, I presume,” I said.

  “Luke!” Savannah screamed, and they struggled to find each other in the darkness.

  Their two shadows embraced in the moonlight and they spun in circles on the wooden floor, sending the wooden chair clattering into the wall.

  “I’m so glad I didn’t kill you two,” Luke shouted. “You surprised me.”

  “We’re delighted you didn’t kill us, Luke,” said Savannah.

  “Kill us!” I said. “Jesus Christ. Why would you even think of killing us?”

  “They find this place, little brother,” he answered, “and there’s no more time on the big clock. I didn’t even think you two little poots would remember this place.”

  “We’ve come to talk you into going back with us, Luke,” Savannah said.

  “Not even you talk that good, sugar-peeps,” Luke said.

  We moved out under the stars and we watched him pull his kayak to the shelter of the tent. Savannah brought out the bottle of Wild Turkey and she poured him a glassful as we sat on the small porch smelling the wind as it came through the marsh. For ten minutes none of us said a single word as we all tried to marshal both our arguments and our declarations of love for one another. I wanted to say the words that would save my brother’s life but I was not
certain what those words were. My tongue lay like a stone in my mouth. My head was full of ferocities, assertions, and absolute demands spinning out of control in orbits of collision. All the preludes of silence were dangerous and electric.

  “You’re looking good, Luke,” said Savannah, at last. “Revolution seems to agree with you.”

  Luke laughed and said, “I’m not much of a revolutionary. You’re talking to the whole army of the revolution right here. I need to work a little bit on recruitment.”

  “What are you trying to prove, Luke?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Tom,” he answered. “I think I’m trying to prove that there’s one human being left on earth who’s not a sheep. That’s how it started out anyway. I was so goddamn angry at Mom and the town and the government that I got caught up in the procedures of it all and couldn’t see my way out of it. Once I blew out the bridges and those guys on the train were killed, there wasn’t any turning back. Now I spend most of my time hiding from them.”

  “Have you thought about giving up?” Savannah asked.

  “No,” he answered. “They need to know that their project has attracted some loyal opposition. I don’t regret anything I’ve done except for the death of those men. I just wish I could have been more effective.”

  “They’ve got guys out hunting you all over these islands, Luke,” I said.

  “I’ve seen them,” he said.

  “I hear they’re good,” I said. “They’ve got two ex-Green Berets who like to eat babies with their morning coffee out in the woods looking for you.”

  “They don’t know the terrain,” he said. “It makes it hard on them. I’ve thought about hunting them down and killing them but I’ve got no quarrel with them.”

  “You’ve got no quarrel with men who’ve been hired to kill you?” Savannah said.

  “It’s just their job,” he replied. “Just like mine used to be shrimping. How’re Mom and Dad getting along?”

  “Dad’s making license plates to repay his debt to society,” I said. “Mom is somewhat embarrassed when she goes to the post office to find her oldest son’s photograph on wanted posters up on the wall, but she’s a Newbury now and she’s farting through silk and there’s always a hint of caviar on her breath.”