The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  “Egg be suck dry,” said Cindy.

  It took me a long time but I soon became aware of an underlying, pervasive fixation for violence among the people of the island. Violence was part of the culture and it erupted periodically during the year and affected the children in my class. I had only superficial knowledge about their homes and families and it took me a very long time to realize that classroom depression or exhaustion usually indicated that fathers were drinking too much or mothers were down at the club too late, or worse.

  To begin with, the island was a small arsenal. Every home, black and white, contained enough firearms and weaponry to hold off a platoon of Marines for a fortnight. The people supplemented their food supply with squirrel, possum, and an occasional deer, and the boys in my room continually bragged about their marksmanship. Guns were as necessary and vital to the island as fishing poles or crab traps.

  The most impressive collection of rifles on the island belonged to Ted Stone. In one of his rambling dissertations on what’s good and what’s bad for Yamacraw, he intimated that his formidable array of hardware was added insurance that the natives would never venture into his compound uninvited. His gun rack was antlered with high-powered carbines and short, heavy shotguns. “I can handle any trouble on this island. My only worry is outside agitators. Communists trained in Havana. Nigger-lovers comin’ to make trouble.” I thought at the time he was referring to the California boys, but I later realized he could have been saying this as a warning to me.

  Alcohol always precipitated the violence. Drinking was a way of life on the island. Both the men and women consumed great quantities of liquor and beer, drinking themselves into a stumbling, muttering limbo from time to time. Of course, I understood very well why people drank on the island. It was the single form of entertainment, the social medium that bound the island together, the only sport, the only recreation, the focal point of island activity. And alcohol brought the same relief to poor farmers and crabbers that it brought to emperors; its particular, elusive magic could dull the cumulative effects of being poor, jobless, isolated, and frustrated. That it could cripple, ruin, and summon cruel demons from the darker side of a man’s soul was secondary. On Yamacraw its most important function was to bring joy, relief, and euphoria; it desensitized a person into not caring whether he had a job, clothes for his children, or money for food.

  One of the younger kids whispered to me one morning that Anna’s grandmother had been shot the night before. When I asked how it happened, all I got for an answer was a grin and a silent tongue. Whenever some crisis welled up on the island, I had learned that the children would never come to me directly and narrate the story as it happened. They would drop hints, let me overhear conversations, give me fragments of the story, until I more or less knew what had happened.

  It was through this piecemeal gathering of bits and pieces that I learned an unnamed man had gotten drunk, come to Anna’s house, swaggered and stumbled about the house brandishing a pistol and “talkin’ big.” The end result was a bullet entering her grandmother’s side. Whether the shooting was accidental or attempted murder I never learned or was meant to learn. A woman had been shot, the kids wanted me to know, but they did not want me to know the circumstances surrounding the shooting or the name of the dark stranger who wielded the gun. I asked Anna if she needed any help or if there was anything I could do to help her or her grandmother. I did not mention the shooting. Anna simply shook her head negatively and smiled her beautiful, inscrutable, profoundly silent smile.

  Several months later I entered the classroom one morning to find the kids uncharacteristically silent. I was very unaccustomed to introspective, confessional silences any time during the day, but I was especially suspicious of morning quiet. It generally meant that Mrs. Brown had set a fanny afire. But this morning was different. I saw three of the guys with their heads on their desks crying—Oscar, Fred, and Prophet. I walked over to them and asked, “Did she hit you?” Everyone else shook their heads. “Then what in the hell happened?” Still no answer, and by this time I had realized that there would be no answer for right now. I knew that the story would be revealed in scraps and tiny portions over the day. I also knew that the story would not come from Oscar, Fred, or Prophet, but from the others. And it did.

  At recess I heard one of the kids whisper too loudly about “their momma gittin’ shoot up.” Then someone mentioned that she was shot in the foot. Lincoln walked up behind me and said she would be all right. One of the girls said that Oscar’s father had done the shooting. Carolina said he had been drinking. Through this random method of communication, the full story evolved and took form. The father had gotten very drunk and abusive; the mother had gotten very drunk and acrimonious. A pitched, screaming battle ensued with the boys cowering in the back bedroom until they heard a shot, ran to the kitchen, and found their mother bleeding. The scene must have been terrifying. I know it was traumatic. It took several weeks for the shock of the event to wear off the boys. They cried easily and pitifully for many days after the shooting took place. Fred seemed to be particularly affected. His attention span, normally short, became almost nonexistent. During a phonics rally, Fred suddenly started crying when Jasper teased him about his speech impediment. He ran to the bathroom, where I followed him. He put his head on the sink and wept as if something was breaking up deep inside him. I rested my arm on his shoulder and told him to cry all he wanted, that sometimes a man just felt like crying and it made him feel better in the end. He cried for an hour.

  The shooting incident made me take a closer look at Prophet. The kids had told me that no one messed with Prophet, even the boys in the class much larger than him. It was said that Prophet went crazy when he got angry and would kill anyone who crossed him during his smoldering rages. A fifth grader who killed, I thought? The smiling, mischievous Prophet I knew in class did not seem capable of the violence attributed to him by his peers. He was a tough kid, very scrappy, but not a killer. Oscar, his brother, however, traced the history of Prophet’s eruptions one day after school. On one occasion, Oscar had beaten Prophet up, the birthright of every older brother. Later in the day Oscar was running down the hall, when Prophet stepped out from a room and flattened Oscar with a brick slapped against his forehead. A man, it seemed, should exercise discretion when bullying Prophet. At another time Prophet reduced a much older brother to weeping and begging for his life. Prophet led him all over the house with a loaded pistol at his head, threatening to blow his head off at any second. Frank told me, “That boy go wild when he gits hold of a gun.” I do not think I even looked harshly at Prophet for the remainder of the year.

  The final paroxysm of violence involved me and the class directly. It was in the spring when the fringe of forest around the school celebrated the renewal of leaf and bud and the wildflowers began to color the edges of the dirt roads. It was late in the morning. A knock sounded on the schoolhouse door. It was Ethel’s mother, Lois.

  “May I please see Ethel, Pat?” she asked.

  “Sure, Lois,” I answered, sensing that something was wrong. “What’s wrong? You look like you’re hurting.”

  “Oh Gawd, that damn husband of mine. Oh Gawd, he hurt me bad.”

  “What’s wrong, Lois? Where did he hurt you?”

  “On my back. He hit me on my back,” she answered, leaning against the door. “He nearly kill me.”

  “What did he hit you with?”

  “A chair, Pat. He break a chair over my back. He try to kill me. Chair break up when he hit me. I think my back break when he hit.”

  “You wouldn’t be walking around with a broken back.”

  “Oh, somethin’ break. I know somethin’ break,” she wailed. By this time Ethel was standing beside her mother with an expression of complete stoicism on her face. Not a flicker of emotion crossed her eyes or moved her lips. Whatever storm she felt thundered in a place neither I nor the world could see.

  “You O.K., Mama,” she said quietly.

  �
�Oh, Ethel, I hurt so bad. He hit me with a chair. He break the chair on me.”

  “We git ’im back, Mama,” Ethel said impassively.

  “Pat, will you drive me to my house? I got some money hid that I don’t want him to git hold of.”

  “I don’t know, Lois. If John is still down there, he’s liable to break a chair over my damn head.”

  “Oh, he go way. Go down to the club to get drunk up. He ain’t in the house no mo’.”

  “Are you sure, Lois? Are you damn sure?”

  “I pretty sure. ”

  It was lunch time, so Ethel, Lois, and I got in the car and drove over to Edna Graves’ house. Edna was Frank’s grandmother and the first lady I approached about the Halloween trip. She was also, I found out, Lois’s mother. Lois wanted me to drive her to Edna’s house so she could narrate her latest domestic misadventure to a sympathetic ear. Edna’s ear was far more murderous than sympathetic. When she heard how John had demolished a chair over her daughter’s back, she went insane.

  “You tell that dirty son of a bitch that if he ever comes here again that ol’ Edna gonna shoot him daid. Daid, I say. Did everybody hear me? I mean I am gonna git Betsy out of the house, load her up, point Betsy at his head, and put him in the ground. He ain’t gonna mess with me and Betsy. And I ain’t gonna talk to that son of a bitch no mo’. I done through talkin’. Betsy’s gonna do all my talkin’ now on. And when Betsy done do the talkin’, that son of a bitch ain’t gonna be doin’ no mo’ list’nin’,” ranted Edna, her body bent and trembling in anger, her index finger slashing the air for emphasis. “He hit my daughter. Beat my daughter. Make my daughter cry. Make her bleed. Now I’m gonna make him bleed. Edna and Betsy are gonna git his ass. You hear me? Git his ass and git it good.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Lois said.

  “Don’t you ’oh, Mama’ me, girl. Go git your stuff and your chillun and git up to this house and leave that son of a bitch. Leave him. You hear me. Leave him ’fore he kills you or Betsy kills him.”

  To a do-gooding, bleeding-hearted Pollyanna, the whole scene seemed incredible, exotic, savage, and ritualistic to me. From Ethel’s reaction I could tell that this was not the first time her grandmother had delivered this same speech, nor was it the first time her mother and father had waged war against each other. I had heard from the island grapevine that John and Lois were alcoholics and that their battles under the influence were epic in their turbulence and fury. The family had an impressive history of broken heads and cauliflower ears. John, in fact, had been blinded in one eye during a fight. As he was beating his wife with a club, she threw a potful of potash into his eye, and darkness instantly ruled his left side. It was a very physical family.

  After Edna’s long soliloquy ended, we continued down the road to Lois’s house. All the way down, the thought that John might still be in the house, inebriated and feeling his Schlitz, caused me a great deal of anxiety. He was lame in one foot, but I knew that my swiftness would be as the wind if John made a threatening move toward me. I also knew that bullets had been known to travel a bit faster than feet. So with these cheerful thoughts I steered the car toward the house. Ethel sat beside me in the front seat. Her mother occupied the back seat, chattering about leaving her husband for good, and how much her back pained her. I looked over to say something reassuring to Ethel and saw her fiddling with a shining object in her hand. It was a razor blade.

  “What in the hell are you doing with that thing, Ethel?” I demanded to know.

  “Jes’ for a little protection.”

  “You don’t need it. Put it away.”

  “No.”

  “Ethel, I am your teacher. Other kids at other schools listen to their teachers and do what they say.”

  This seemed to tickle her and she smiled. Then she said, “I’ll put it away, but I’ll take it out if he’s there. ”

  “You don’t have to worry, man. I’m here,” I said heroically.

  “He may git you too,” she said, confirming my worst fears.

  “Well, what are you gonna do with that thing if he’s there?” I asked.

  “I’m gonna cut ’im,” she answered without smiling.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I replied, wanting to fling myself under the wheel of the car.

  The house finally came into view. I rolled the car easily into the front yard, got out, and with a voice that tried to be virile, but came out with a squeak of axle and a squawk of poultry, I said, “John. John. It’s me, your good friend Pat.” When I discovered that he wasn’t home, Lois went into the house, extracted her money from a secret place, and returned to the car.

  I took Lois to Bluffton to see Dr. Wohlert. He x-rayed her back, discovered that it was just badly bruised, and gave her some medicine. She spent that night with Barbara and me, returned to the island and her mother for a few days, then went back to her husband. The strange thing was that John and Lois really liked each other.

  Barbara invited my whole class to our house for a Valentine’s Day party. Her class at Beaufort Elementary was coming over and she thought it would be a nice gesture to bring the two groups together. Barbara crafted an ornate, lacy valentine for me to pin on my bulletin board inviting the class for the holiday weekend. Only the girls decided to come. The boys glanced suspiciously at the lace and the enormous red heart, then decided there was something intrinsically feminine about this gathering at the Conracks’. They said they would rather hunt and kill in the deep woods. The girls bounded in joy when they discovered they would be going on the trip without those nasty boys. So on Friday of Valentine’s week, four of the girls and I laboriously fluttered and putted in choppy waters toward the landing in Bluffton.

  This was the first time the girls had stayed at our new house. We had recently bought a two-story, seventy-year-old home on The Point. We put them in the downstairs bedroom to sleep. They demanded they be allowed to sleep together. I later learned why. Mary had felt the presence of ghosts in the house from the moment she saw it. She spread this notion to the other girls, and by nightfall the four of them had clustered in the living room, clucking about imagined noises, footsteps on the dark stairs, and faces pressed against windowpanes. I had not realized how real and palpable the spirit world was to them, and even when I heard them voicing their fears, I was more delighted than alarmed.

  “You got a ghost in this big ol’ house, Mr. Conroy,” Mary muttered.

  “We hear ’im in the stairs,” said Jimmy Sue.

  “I ain’t stayin’ in this ol’ scarey house,” said Cindy Lou.

  “Oh, Gawd, I so scare. I don’t want no ghost to git me,” said Carolina.

  So then I did a very foolish thing. “Girls, I didn’t want to tell you this. But you’re right. We’ve got a ghost in this house. Barbara and I just didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Oh Gawd, I knew it. I feel it. I feel it all the time,” wailed Mary.

  “It’s not a big ghost. It’s a dwarf ghost, a little fellow. He murdered his wife with an ax and was hung by the neck until he was dead. He walks around this house at night now, looking for his murdered wife. I saw him once. He had long fingernails, more like the claws you would find on an eagle. His teeth were long and white and sharp. Some people claim he drinks blood, but only a certain type of blood. The blood of young girls who live on Yamacraw Island.”

  “Oh Jesus!”

  “Oh, Gawd, I leave this house now.”

  “I’m just joking, gang,” I said. “It’s just a big joke. There’s no such thing as a ghost.”

  “You crazy. I see ghost on Yamacraw.”

  “You ain’t never seen a ghost befo’?” asked Cindy Lou.

  “No,” I answered. That’s because there’s no such thing as ghosts. They do not exist. There is no such thing. Never was and never will be.”

  “If you ain’t never seen no ghost, how do you know there ain’t no ghosts around?” Cindy Lou asked.

  “Do you believe a dwarf ghost lives in this house?” I asked.

  “Y
eh,” they agreed.

  “Do you know where he lives?” I asked macabrely. They shook their heads negatively. “In your bedroom,” I uttered with the voice of a gravedigger.

  They screamed, ran about like beheaded poultry, then huddled on the couch.

  I was still not taking their phobia seriously and was trying to think of a way to eliminate this nonsense once and for all. I did not realize that I was not dealing with nonsense but with a culture, a history, and something very kin to religion. I was determined to laugh them out of their belief in the otherworldly. To do this I chose to perform a very improper, very insensitive, but very typical Conroy drama.

  “I am going into your room right now to see if I can find the dwarf ghost. I am going to prove that he does not exist and that no ghosts exist in this house. I will not turn on any lights but will go in alone in the dark,” I said, going into the hallway that led to the haunted bedroom. I closed the bedroom door and remained absolutely quiet. The girls grew fidgety as the minutes passed by. Finally they started calling my name and pleading with me to come out. I remained silent. They became more agitated and the entire group gathered in the darkness of the hall, huddling together, half-smiling, half-whimpering. When they got near the door, I crashed through it and fell to the rug like a dead man. I lay on the floor moaning that the dwarf ghost had done me wrong by sucking on my jugular vein. Of course, by then I was talking to myself, for the group had shot through the doors, screaming and yelling for Barbara.

  Mary was half-delirious with terror. The others were hiding their heads under pillows by the couch or cowering behind living room chairs. It took several hours to restore equilibrium to the scene. I had not only traumatized the four girls, but Jessica, my three-year-old daughter, had also been in the hall when my limp body had plummeted to the floor. She was hysterical and would not let me within three feet of her. As Barbara, who had rushed into the living room as soon as she heard the Armageddon erupt, shot me disapproving glances, I tried to explain how I was simply attempting to dispel this superstitious belief in ghosts. Nowhere in the frantic, fear-ravaged room could I find a sympathetic eye.