The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “The girl. The brown-haired girl. The one who saved us when our mother was killed.”

  “Ah. Rose,” the second hound said.

  “Thank you, Rose,” the third one said. “Care for the fox. It is good you came.”

  “Why do you hunt?”

  “It is our nature, Rose,” the first hound explained as the three hounds turned and swam back to the opposite shore.

  The fox struggled to the land and collapsed at Rose’s feet. She carried him to the barn, cleaned his wound, and nursed him through the night. He was the fiftieth animal that had come to her. He told her about the life of a fox. Rose found it very interesting. She was lonely and sad in her house, but never in the barn.

  In the house without words, Lindsay listened for the song of the fields. She cared for the beef cattle that roamed the lovely pasturage on the south side of the island. She rode in the bed of her mother’s pickup truck and threw off bales of hay in thirty-yard intervals each time her mother came to a stop. The herd moved around the truck, their white faces serene and comely—all except the face of the great bull, Intrepid, who would watch her from a distance, appraising her with dark wild eyes. Intrepid was muscular and dangerous, but Lindsay returned his stare. He was the lord of these fields, she knew, but she wanted him to know that he had nothing to fear from her. She loved the herd, her eyes said. You are one of them, his eyes said back. I cannot help what I am, her stare replied. Nor can I, said his.

  She wandered the pastures alone, playing with the young calves, naming them pretty names that tickled her ear. There was Petunia and Casper, Beelzebub and Jerusalem Artichoke, Rumpelstiltskin and Washington, D.C. Always she kept her distance from Intrepid, who had once almost killed a trespasser on a farm near Charleston. She would always lock the gate to his pasture and walk among the cows and calves unafraid and welcome. Whenever a cow delivered a calf, she would wait in the field beside her, whispering to the mother, and, when necessary, helping with the birth. She admired the resignation of these huge patient beasts. They made good mothers and ordered their lives simply. But Lindsay was attracted to the kingly presence of Intrepid. Like her own father, he was silent. Only his eyes spoke. Until the night the magic changed her life.

  She was asleep and the rain sang against the tin roof. She was dreaming of herself as a calf limping into sunlight on the first day of her life. Her own mother was a cow with a pretty white face and her own father was watching her, a softer, more kindly Intrepid. She heard a voice, which did not surprise her. What surprised her was her response, a lovely murmurous sound rising like smoke from her dream, and her voice rose up in her room in the secret language of herds.

  “You must come,” a deep voice said. “There is need.”

  “Who asks me?”

  “The herd king. You must hurry.”

  She opened her eyes and saw the huge fierce head of Intrepid through her window, his awesome features blurred by the rain. His cold eyes met hers. She got up out of bed and walked to the window. She opened it and the rain was warm against her face. She climbed through the window and onto the back of Intrepid. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held onto his fur with her fingers. Then she held on tightly as the great bull thundered out of the yard and down the dirt road toward the pastures. She felt his enormous strength in the darkness. As she rode beneath the gloom of oaks, the wet moss hung down and touched her like the secret laundry of forest angels. The earth moved away from her and she saw the road from between his great horns curve away from the swamp. She dug her feet against his flanks and her flesh moved with his and she felt horns flowering from her own hair, felt herself becoming part bull, part hooved and dangerous, part lord of the south pastures. Lindsay ran with Intrepid and for one miraculous mile she ran as Intrepid. When he came to the pasture, he slowed. Then he stopped by the three giant palmetto trees that formed the eastern boundary of the pasture. The young cow, Margarita, was giving birth to her first calf. She was early and something was wrong. Intrepid knelt and Lindsay hopped off and ran toward Margarita. It was a breech birth and she could see the calf’s legs protruding from his mother at an odd angle and she felt the desperation of the cow’s struggle. Lindsay seized the calf’s legs and began to pull the calf gently toward her. For over an hour she tried to coax the calf from the mother. Her hair was wet and she could feel the silent presence of Intrepid behind her. She could smell his power as he watched. Though she did not know what she was doing, she felt something slip into place finally, something correct itself. A small female rested on the grass, exhausted but alive. Margarita licked the calf with her great silver tongue and the rain fell. Lindsay named the new calf Bathsheba and nuzzled her face against it.

  Intrepid knelt again and Lindsay rose up on his back again, swinging up on his right horn like a maypole. She rode back to her house in triumph and all the cows applauded as she left the pasture, honored her with their soft mooing. The great bull was silent as he ran down the road again but Lindsay did not care. She put her nose against him and inhaled his wet strength. She licked the rainwater from his neck and returned to her home a changeling, something new and wild and beautiful. She climbed back through her bedroom window, dried herself carefully, and said nothing to her family.

  The power had come to her and she would not abuse it. To speak of it would be to betray it. But that was easy in a house of silence, a house without words.

  The next day Lindsay was walking toward the pasture down the same road she had ridden the night before. She could see the great hoofprints of Intrepid where they had plunged into the soft earth. She had made a circle of flowers to put around Margarita’s neck. But when she passed by the swamp, she heard a rough, eerie cry, a sound she had never heard on the island. Then she felt that strange aura return and a sound issued out of her own throat in reply. This time she was not surprised, but trusting. She felt a connection to wilderness that made her feel invulnerable. She felt alive and open to all things.

  A frightening sound came from her throat, a demonic grunting that startled her. But it was an answer to the smoky voice that had called her.

  “Please,” the voice called, and she plunged into the part of the woods her father had forbidden the girls to enter. She kept to the firm ground, leapt over water, avoided the soft uncertain ground. The heads of water moccasins lifted out of the water like small black periscopes as she passed. They did not speak to her; they were not part of her magic.

  In the center of the swamp she heard a violent thrashing and she rounded a cypress tree and found the old wild boar, Dreadnought, up to his shoulders in quicksand. Her father had hunted Dreadnought for years and never even seen him. Each time the boar struggled, the earth took him deeper and softer into itself. It was like the rescue of the calf’s struggle to be born. Dreadnought’s tusks shone fiercely in the sunlight. His eyes were yellow and the black hair on his back was raised like a line of pine trees on a bare mountain ridge. Lindsay grabbed a dead branch of a sycamore tree, and lying on her belly, she began to advance over the soft ground until she felt herself slipping into the unsteady earth. She balanced her weight and moved forward again, thrusting the branch toward Dreadnought.

  “Please.” The word came to her again.

  She edged forward slowly until the branch reached the boar’s snout. He grabbed it with his savage teeth. She inched backward.

  “Be patient,” she ordered. “Float like it was water.”

  The wild boar relaxed his muscles and the hair on his back flattened. He floated up in the killing mud and he felt the tiny pressure of a ten-year-old girl in his gums. She was patient and moved him only a few inches at a time. Behind her all the wild pigs on the island had gathered to watch the death of their king. Lindsay pulled when she could and rested when it was necessary. Her body hurt but there are duties in the service of magic. At last, Dreadnought put a hoof on a fallen log and his great body quivered as he pulled himself out of the muck and bellowed out his relief and deliverance to the forest. He stepped gingerly a
long the log and did not take a step without carefully testing the land before him. Lucifer, the fifteen-foot alligator, moved through the shallow water and watched the boar as he reached dry land.

  “Too late, Lucifer,” the boar cried out.

  “There will be another time, Dreadnought. I ate one of your sons last week.”

  “And I’ve eaten the eggs of a thousand of your sons.” Then Dreadnought turned toward Lindsay. A flick of his tusk could lay her open from head to foot. Surrounded by boars, she was almost losing her belief in magic. But the boar comforted her with these words before he left with his fierce black tribe. “I owe you, daughter. Thank you for my life.” And the wild hogs melted like shade into the forest and all the snakes of the island trembled and hid at their approach. Lindsay tried to speak to the alligator, Lucifer, but he sank beneath the black water without a ripple thirty feet from where she stood. “So I can’t talk to alligators,” she thought. “Big deal.” But it was the first time she knew her gift was limited.

  The silence of the house bothered Sharon, the youngest child, most of all. She wanted to talk about her father, to tell her favorite stories about him. It would be easier for her to remember him if her mother and sisters would reveal what they loved most about him. When she was nine they would listen to her. She was certain of that.

  She was also the kind of girl who kept her eyes on the ground or lifted them up to gaze into the sky. She cared very little for what was in between. Often, she would bump into trees as she was walking along looking up at ducks winging north or south along the southern flyway. The freedom of birds was attractive to her and she considered it an oversight on God’s part that he had not fitted Adam and Eve with wings. Each sunset she would walk out to the end of the dock, loaded down with bread and scraps to feed the seagulls. She would throw pieces of bread high in the air and the gulls would catch them on the fly. She would be surrounded by the frantic beating of wings and the impatient cries of gulls. Hundreds of birds waited for her every night. Her mother and sisters would watch her nervously from their screened-in porch. Often she would disappear from sight in a flurry of wings and feathers. But all birds made Sharon happy.

  So did bugs. Her mother kept bees and she was the only one of the girls who would help Blaise when she gathered the honey from the hives. To Sharon, a bee was a perfect creature. Not only could it fly, but it had this wonderful job, to visit flowers and gardens all day and then return to chat with all its friends and to make honey at night. But once she noticed bees, she started to study and admire their neighbors. Her room teemed with small boxes of insects, astonishing beetles, praying mantises, grasshoppers who spit tobacco juice on her hands, a whole colony of ants behind glass, butterflies. She loved the wonderful economy of insects. They couldn’t do much, but they could do what they did very well. Her hobby had earned the contempt of her sisters.

  “Yuk, bugs!” Rose had once said upon entering Sharon’s room.

  “Anyone, just anyone, can like a dog or a cow,” Sharon had answered. “It takes a real person to like a bug.”

  Her sister had laughed.

  It happened when Sharon was walking through the woods near her house, looking for new ant colonies. She was carrying a bag full of chocolate chip cookies. Whenever she found a Colony, she would place a single cookie near the anthill and watch with pleasure as the worker ants stumbled on this bonanza and sent one ant back with this juicy piece of gossip. Then ants would spill joyously out of the hill, dismantle the cookie crumb by crumb, and take all the crumbs back under the earth. She had found two new anthills this day and was looking for another when she heard a small voice call her name.

  She looked in the direction where the voice had come. She saw a wasp entangled in the huge silvery web of a garden spider. The garden spider was moving toward the wasp, sliding easily down the web like a seaman coming down rigging. The wasp cried out again and it twisted desperately in the web. Sharon felt strange words forming on her tongue. But they were not words. They were secret sounds and it scared her when she heard herself speak out in a language never spoken by humans on earth. “Stop.”

  The spider stopped with one of his black legs mounting the wasp’s abdomen.

  “It is the way,” the spider said.

  “Not this time,” Sharon answered.

  She took a hairpin and cut the wasp free. The web, as intricate as lace, fell in tatters between the tree. She could hear the wasp singing a love song to her as he flew above the trees.

  “I’m sorry,” Sharon said to the spider.

  “It’s not right,” the spider said grumpily. “This is my role.”

  Sharon hunted through the leaves and found a dead grasshopper, which she placed in the high part of the web. The web quivered like a harp when she touched it.

  “I’m sorry I broke your web. I could not let you do that. It is too terrible.”

  “Have you ever seen a wasp kill?” the spider replied.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “It is no prettier. But it is the way.”

  “I wish I could help fix your web.”

  “You can. Now you can.”

  Sharon felt a trembling in her hands, a power born. The blood of her hands filled up with silk. She reached for the damaged web and lines of silver began to flow from beneath her fingernails. She could not do it at first. She would loop when she should have gone in a straight line. But the spider was patient and soon she had woven a lovely web and it hung like a fisherman’s net between two trees. Then she talked with the spider about his lonely work; there was a lizard living beneath an oak stump nearby who had almost eaten him twice. Sharon suggested he move nearer her house so they could visit more frequently. He agreed and walked the length of her arm to her shoulder. As she walked the spider back toward her house, she heard the colonies of ants singing beneath the earth, praising her and her chocolate chip cookies. Wasps flew up and kissed her lips, tickling her nose with their wings. She had never been so happy.

  She found the spider a new home without lizards. He was placed between two camellia bushes and together they wove a web even more beautiful than the last. She said goodbye to him when she saw the sun was setting. She heard the cries of the gulls at the end of the dock.

  The seagulls were waiting for her, hovering in the air currents above the river like a hundred kites extending from strings of varying lengths. She left the house carrying a shopping bag full of scraps her mother had saved for her. Running, she heard the voices of crickets and beetles in the grass telling her to watch her step. She could hardly even walk to the dock without endangering some small creature.

  When she reached the end of the dock, she threw a whole handful of torn bread into the air. Each piece was caught before it hit the water. Again she tossed bread into the air and again the air was full of bread and wings. She was not surprised that she could understand what the gulls were saying to one another. They were quarrelsome, testy, and arguing that some birds were getting more bread than others. High overhead an osprey hovered above the river, waiting for a fish. A small mullet flashed on the surface and she heard the osprey scream, “Now,” as he dove toward the water. He rose up with the fish quivering in his claws.

  There was a strange gull watching her. He was larger than the other gulls, black-backed and surly, an ocean-flier, and he hung above the river, appraising her. She called hello to him but there was no reply. When she was finished feeding the birds, she wished all of them good night. The black-backed gull flew to the end of the dock and blocked her way. The fatigue of long travel was in the gull’s eyes.

  “What do you want?” Sharon asked.

  “Your father is alive.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have seen him,” said the tired gull.

  “Is he in danger?”

  “He is in great danger.”

  “Return, gull. Please, help him.”

  Wearily, the gull flapped his great wings, lifted into the air, and turned south. Sharon watched unt
il the bird disappeared. The crickets sang in the grass and Sharon understood every word.

  She returned to the house and found her mother at the stove, cooking dinner. The smell of onions turning gold in butter filled the house. She wanted to tell her mother what the gull had said but did not know how to explain her gift. But she was happy knowing her father was alive. She helped her sisters set the table. The radio was playing in the kitchen. Blaise kept the radio on all day, just in case there was news of her husband. But there was no news of importance to her. The price for pork was falling. The rains had hurt the tomato crop. And three men had escaped from the state correctional institute in Columbia after killing a guard. They were thought to be heading in the direction of North Carolina.

  It was late in the afternoon the next day. The forest was quiet and the three men studied the house from the woods. Each of them had a face that had forgotten how to smile. They studied the movement of the three girls and the woman as they moved in and out of the house. They saw not a trace of a man. They began to move unseen toward the house. But they were seen. The spider watched their approach from his place between the camellia bushes. A wild pig, daughter of Dreadnought, noticed their approach. A gull watched their every movement. A wasp moved in the trees above them. A puppy in the barn, barely able to walk, newly found by Rose, sniffed the air and wondered about the smell. It was the smell of evil come to quiet places. The three men moved toward the house.

  They broke into the house through three separate doors and they broke in violently, leaving no room for escape.

  Rose screamed when she saw their faces and their pistols. All three girls ran to the chair where their mother was sitting reading a book.

  The short man ran to the gun rack and took the three shotguns from the rack and threw boxes of ammunition into a paper sack. The fat man moved toward the kitchen and began filling a trash bag full of canned food. The large man trained his pistol on Blaise and her daughters. He could not take his eyes off Blaise.