The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  Once a week my father would write and my mother would read those letters to us right before we went to sleep. He wrote in a clipped, military prose that read like an order of the day. He described each mission to us as though he were speaking of an errand to buy bread or fill the car up with gas. “I was flying recon with Bill Lundin. We were watching a squad of our grunts winding up some mountain when I spotted something funny going on just above them. I radioed Bill and said, ‘Hey, Bill, you see what I see?’ I look over and see Bill straining his eyes. Sure enough, ol’ Bill sees it too. About halfway up the mountain, there were about three hundred North Korean regulars waiting to ambush these poor grunts. So I get on the radio and I radio down to the grunts and I say, ‘Hey, boys, call a halt to your little daytrip.’ ‘Why?’ the guy asks me. ‘Because you’re walking into the arms of half of North Korea,’ I say. He gets my drift. Then Bill and I decide to go down and ruin those nectarines’ entire afternoon. I go first and lay a few napalm on their heads. It certainly got their attention. I saw thirty of them trying to wipe flames off their bodies like they were cleaning lint from their coat. But it don’t work that way. Then Bill lays a few more eggs and we got us a party going on. I radioed back and a whole squadron lifted off to help us. We chased that battalion for three days. Refueling, then hunting, then refueling and hunting again. Finally we caught what was left of them crossing the Naktong River. Caught them in the open. Turned the river red. It was fun but it didn’t do an ounce of good. Folks breed like mink over here and there’s plenty more where they come from. Tell the kids I love them very much. Tell them to pray for the old Dad and to watch out for their Mama.”

  “Who is Papa John, Mama?” Savannah asked my mother one evening.

  “He’s Tolitha’s husband. You know that,” she answered.

  “But who is he to us? Is he our grandfather?”

  “No. Your grandfather Amos lives in Colleton. You know that.”

  “But Tolitha’s our grandmother, isn’t she?”

  “She’s your cousin when we’re up here. She doesn’t want Papa John to know you’re her grandchildren.”

  “But she’s Dad’s mother, isn’t she?”

  “When we’re here in this house, she’s your father’s cousin. Don’t ask me to explain. It’s too complicated. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “Why isn’t she still married to Grandpa Wingo?”

  “They haven’t been married for years. You’ll understand it later. Don’t ask so many questions. It’s none of your business. Besides, Papa John treats you as though you’re his grandchildren, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Luke said, “but is he your father, Mama? Where’s your mother and father?”

  “They died a long time before you were born.”

  “What were their names?” I asked.

  “Thomas and Helen Trent,” she answered.

  “What were they like?” Savannah asked.

  “Very handsome people. They looked like a prince and princess. Everyone said so.”

  “Were they rich?”

  “They were very rich before the Depression. The Depression wiped them out.”

  “Do you have any pictures of them?”

  “No. They were all burned down in the fire that destroyed their house.”

  “Is that what killed them?”

  “Yes. It was a terrible fire,” my mother said without emotion, her face drawn and apprehensive. My mother, the beauty. My mother, the liar.

  As children, we had but one duty. In the basement, in rows of dusty Mason jars, Papa John kept his collection of black widow spiders, which, as a hobby, he sold to biology teachers, entomologists, zoos, and private collectors around the country. We were given the job of caring for those small malignant spiders, which floated like black cameos in their jars. Twice a week, Luke, Savannah, and I would descend into the moist glooms, switch on the naked exposed bulb, and feed those mute arachnids, any one of which, we were assured by a garrulous Papa John, “could kill us deader than a stone.” We had helped feed poultry since we could walk, but these descents required a courage and agitated sense of commitment no chicken ever inspired. When the feeding hour approached, we would gather in Papa John’s bedroom, listen to his careful instructions, then descend the wooden staircase to face the minuscule, satanic livestock who watched us in stillness like the approach of flies.

  On Saturdays we brought the jars of spiders up to Papa John for his inspection. He would wipe the jars clean of dust with a linen cloth. He eyed the spiders with discrimination. He would question us closely about their feeding habits. He would count the pear-shaped egg sacs and make notations in a small notebook whenever there was a crop of new spiders. Cautiously, he would remove a spider and let it walk back and forth across a dinner plate, turning it with a pair of tweezers when it neared the edge. He would point to the red hourglass delicately tattooed on the female spider’s abdomen and say, “There. That’s what you look for. That hourglass means ‘I kill.’ ”

  “Why do you collect black widows, Papa John?” Savannah asked one day. “Why not goldfish or stamps or something pretty?”

  “Because I was a shoe salesman, sweetie,” he answered, “a shoe salesman and a damn good one. But being a shoe salesman is the most common thing in the world. I wanted to do something no one else I knew did. Something special. So I became the shoe salesman who raised black widows in his basement. It’s an attention getter.”

  “Do they really eat their husbands?” Luke asked.

  “These are very stern women,” Papa John answered. “They eat their husbands right after they mate.”

  “Can they really kill you?” I asked.

  “I think they can kill a child fairly easily,” he said. “I’m not sure they can kill a full-grown man, though. The guy that got me started in this business had been bitten a couple of times. He said it made him sick enough to think he would die. But he was still walking around.”

  “How did he get bit?” I asked.

  “Black widows are kind of shy except when they’re defending their eggs. Then they’re a mite aggressive. He liked to let them walk around on his arm,” Papa John said, smiling.

  Savannah said, “That makes me sick to think about it.”

  “He sure raised pretty spiders, though,” Papa John said, studying his pets.

  The care of black widows inspired a patience and concentration rare in young children. We took our responsibilities seriously and studied the life cycle of the spiders with the supercharged zealotry born of caring for creatures who could kill us. My lifelong love of spiders and insects began with my nose pressed close against Mason jars, observing the tedious and horrifying existence of black widows. They hung motionless in webs spun out of their viscera. They lived dangling and still, black in the high wires of their jar-shaped lives. When they moved quickly, it was to kill. Over the months, we watched the females kill and devour the males. We became attuned to the seasons of spiders and time poured out of the red hourglasses in shimmering, ill-formed webs. We watched egg cases exploding into spiders newly minted, scattering like brown and orange seeds across a jar. Our fear of them turned to fascination and advocacy. There was such beauty in the economical structure of spiders; they moved across webs with the secret of lace making and silk screening implied in their loins, aerialists in a quart of Georgia air. They were good at doing what they were born to do.

  Behind the house, a large deciduous forest, circumvallated by a low stone fence, stretched all the way to Briarcliff Road. There were “No Trespassing” signs posted along the fence at thousand-foot intervals. Our grandmother informed us in a breathless, conspiratorial voice that “very, very rich people” lived on the property and that under no circumstances were we ever to cross the fence to play in those verboten woods. This was the Candler family, the heirs of Coca-Cola, and whenever my grandmother spoke of them it was as though she were describing a collegial association of some scrupulous peerage. According to my grandmother, the Candlers were the
nearest thing Atlanta had to a royal family, and she would not allow us to desecrate their walled baronage.

  But we would approach that fence after school each day, that deep-green, perfumed realm forbidden to us, and smell the money coming through the trees. We longed to glimpse a single member of that noble and enchanted family. But we were children and soon we were climbing the fence and taking a few forbidden steps into the forest, then racing back to the safety of the stone wall. The next time we would step off ten paces into the woods before we lost our nerve and returned to our own yard. Slowly, we began to demythologize the outlawed woods. Soon we knew the acreage of that forest better than any Candler ever had. We learned its secrets and boundaries, hid in its groves and arbors, and felt the old thrill of disobedience buoyant in young hearts gallant enough to ignore the strange laws of adults. Surrounded by trees, we hunted squirrels with slingshots, watched from the high branches of trees the lucky Candler children, looking serious and bored, cantering thoroughbreds down forest paths, and spied on the gardener fertilizing banks of azaleas.

  And one warm November night, we slipped out of an upstairs bedroom, climbed down the immense oak that ruled our quadrant of the house, and walked through the forest all the way to the Candler mansion itself. Lying on our stomachs, we crawled toward that opulent Tudor mansion through the thick grass and watched, through the silver light of French doors, the great family itself at dinner. Servants were wheeling in food on elaborate dollies. The Candlers, erect and pallid, ate their meal as if they were attending a church service, such was their seriousness, their unruffled ecclesiastical mien.

  In awe we watched the meal consumed, the blaze of candelabra lifting off the table like buckheads on fire, the tender light of chandeliers, the lethargy and restrained grandeur of wealth. Lying in a field of freshly mown grass, we attended to every detail of that casual, slowly evolving meal. There was no laughter or conversation from the royal family, and the rich, we assumed, were silent as fish. The servants moved stiffly in penguinesque charades through the room. They measured the pace of the meal, poured wine into half-filled glasses, floated like undertakers from window to window, unaware of our presence. At that very moment, disguised as night creatures, we inhaled the delicious aromas of that meal, watching as secret Candlers, initiates into the extraordinary rites and customs of the Coca-Cola princes. They did not know we owned their forest.

  The house was known as Callanwolde.

  In the woods of Callanwolde, we found a fitting substitute for the island denied to us by the Korean War. We built a treehouse in one of Callanwolde’s extravagant oaks. We resumed our interrupted life as country children in the middle of the South’s largest city. Quails called to us at dusk. A family of gray foxes lived beneath an uprooted cottonwood. We would come to the forest to remember who we were, what we had come from, and where we would be returning. Once we had crossed the fence and made our claim on that prohibited acreage, Atlanta became a perfect city.

  It was only later that I realized I loved Atlanta because it was the only place on earth I had ever lived without a father. By then, Atlanta had darkened in the imagination. By then, the woods of Callanwolde had become a fearful place. By then, the giant had come into our lives and the children, unafraid of spiders, would learn the harsh lesson that they had much to learn and fear from the world of men.

  It was early March and the dogwoods were just beginning to bloom. The whole earth shivered with the green tumult of ripening, sun-soft days, and we were walking through the woods, looking for box turtles. Savannah saw him first. She froze and pointed at something ahead of us.

  He was standing beside a tree covered with poison sumac, relieving himself. He was the largest, most powerful man I had ever seen and I had grown up with men of legendary strength who worked around the shrimp docks in Colleton. He grew out of the earth like some fantastic, grotesque tree. His body was thick, marvelous, and colossal. His eyes were blue and vacant. A red beard covered his face, but there was something wrong about him. It was the way he looked at us, far different from the way adults normally studied children, that alerted us to danger. The three of us felt the menace in his disengaged stare. His eyes did not seem connected to anything human. He zipped up his pants and turned toward us. He was almost seven feet tall. We ran.

  We made it to the stone fence, clambered over it, and ran screaming into our back yard. When we reached the back porch, we saw him standing at the edge of the woods, observing us. The fence we had to climb over barely came to his waist. My mother came out of the back door when she heard our screams. We pointed toward the man in the woods.

  “What do you want, mister?” my mother shouted, taking a few steps toward the man.

  She saw the change in his face too; she sensed the demonic, unjoined quality in his eyes.

  “You,” he said to my mother, and his voice was strangely high-pitched for such a large man. He did not seem cruel or unbalanced; he simply seemed inhuman.

  “What?” my mother asked, frightened by his lack of affect.

  “I want you,” the giant said, taking his first step toward her.

  We ran for the house and as my mother locked the back door I saw him watching her through the kitchen window. I had never seen a man stare at a woman with such primitive lust until I saw that stranger looking at my mother. I had never studied eyes that were born to hate women.

  My mother saw him through the window and she walked over and pulled the shade.

  “I’ll be back,” the man said, and we could hear his laughter as my mother dialed the number for the police.

  When the police came, he was gone. The police combed the woods and the only thing they found was our treehouse and a single footprint from a size nineteen shoe. My mother spanked us for trespassing on Callanwolde property.

  In our minds, I think we children truly believed that we had summoned the visitation of the giant, that he was the manifestation of our willful disobedience, that he had been called out of the netherworld as an instrument of divine, unappeasable justice to punish us for crossing the fence into the taboo frontiers of Callanwolde. We had profaned the lands of the rich, we thought, and God had sent this giant to punish us.

  We never entered the Callanwolde property again, but the giant had already exposed the gravity of our sin. He would require expiation. He would bring Callanwolde into our home. He would come as the lordly inquisitor and punish the sins of the Wingo children in a perverse and imaginative way. He would not punish the sinners for their crimes, for he understood well how to punish children most grievously. When he came, he would come for our mother.

  Another secret was added to that house of endless intrigue. We could not tell Papa John about the intruder from the forest. “Because he’s got such a weak heart, honey,” my grandmother explained to me. I thought he should be told immediately, feeling with enormous justification that we needed someone on our side who could slay two hundred Turks if the giant returned. But my grandmother assured us that she and my mother were big girls and could take care of themselves.

  During the next week we were vigilant and cautious, but the days passed without incident and the streets of Atlanta erupted in a white flaming of dogwood. Bees moaned in the ecstasy of clovers and azaleas. My mother wrote a letter to Grandpa Wingo that week, telling him the exact date we would be returning to the island after my father returned stateside. She asked him to hire a black woman to clean up the house for their arrival. She was careful to mention that my grandmother sent him her kindest regards. Then she let each of the children write “I love you, Grandpa” at the bottom of the letter. She addressed the letter to our house on Melrose Island, knowing that he checked our mailbox more frequently than he did his own. Placing the letter in the mailbox on Rosedale Road, she raised the red metal flag to alert the postman as we left for school on Friday morning. It was only when we returned to the island that summer that we learned my grandfather never received that letter. The letter would not be delivered for more than a decade.
/>
  On Sunday evening we were watching television in the living room. My mother and grandmother were sitting in brown overstuffed armchairs, watching the Ed Sullivan Show. I was sitting on the floor between my mother’s legs. Luke was lying on his stomach, watching the screen and trying to finish his math homework. Savannah was sitting in my grandmother’s lap. My mother passed me a bowl of hot popcorn. I took a generous handful and spilled two kernels on the rug. I picked them up and ate them. Then I felt the room go dead with fear and heard Savannah say the single, electrifying word: “Callanwolde.”

  He was standing on the porch in darkness, staring in at us through the glass-paneled door. I do not know how long he had been watching us but there was a quality of vegetable stillness about him, as though he had sprouted like some dissident, renegade vine as we sat there. His eyes were fixed on my mother. He had returned for her and her alone. His flesh was morbidly pale, the color of a tincture of alabaster, and he filled the doorway like a column upholding a ruin.

  Placing one enormous hand on the doorknob, he twisted it violently and we heard the strain of the metal. As my mother rose she said to my grandmother, “Walk very slowly into the hallway and call the police, Tolitha.”

  My mother walked toward the door and faced the stranger.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Lila,” he replied, and my mother took a step back in shock when she heard him use her name. His voice was ill-fitting and still high-pitched. He smiled a hideous smile at her and turned the knob again.

  My mother then saw his penis, exposed and enormous, rising out of him, the color of pig flesh. Savannah screamed when she saw it and I saw Luke moving up from the floor.