by Pat Conroy
“What do you want?” Blaise asked, and the girls could hear the terror in her voice.
“C’mon,” the short man shouted from the kitchen. “We got to keep moving.”
Still staring at Blaise, the man said, “Before we kill them, I want to take the woman to the back room.”
“We ain’t got time,” the fat man whined.
The large man moved toward Blaise, grabbed her roughly by the wrist, and pulled her toward him. Rose attacked the man, suddenly and furiously. She ran at him, her hand formed into a claw, and she ripped his cheek with her fingernails, drawing blood. He slapped her hard in the face and she went down on her knees. Tears filled her eyes but she put her head on the floor and a strange voice came from her throat in waves of anger and terror. It was an inhuman voice and the men laughed when they heard it.
But the puppy in the barn did not laugh. She had been brought there that morning by Rose. The puppy had been abandoned on the schoolhouse steps and Rose had found her and brought her home. The puppy moved out of the barn and down toward the river. She stumbled once over her floppy ears and her outsized feet. Panting, she reached the dock and paused to catch her breath. Looking out to the river, she lifted her voice in a high-pitched cry for help. Her whelps carried across the river but there was no response. She tried again. Still nothing. But the fox that Rose had once saved from the dogs heard the puppy. The fox began to sing near his lair. A farm dog from across the river picked it up and passed the message from farm to farm until it reached the town. Rose kept screaming on the floor, certain that no one had heard her.
But at that very moment all the dogs of the town had begun to stir in that vast green county. They began to dig holes under fences that restrained them, escape from kennels, break through the windows of their master’s houses, all of them. The highways of the county were clogged by the movement of dogs migrating overland. At the pound where the doomed ones awaited their execution, a stray dog bit a hole through a wire fence and fifty dogs who would be dead in a week joined the fierce sprint to the island. They were a lean, united pack and a hunger possessed them. An evil man had mistreated Rose, so new to womanhood, the lover of dogs, the one who had taken the time to learn their language. The pack moved swiftly. It shared a mission.
Lindsay, seeing her sister weeping on the floor, picked up an ashtray and flung it at the tall man. She lowered her head and charged into his legs. “I won’t let you hurt my mother,” she screamed. The large man lifted her face and slapped it hard, sending her spinning across the room, blood spilling out of her nose. But Lindsay did not cry as the men expected. Instead, they heard her scream out in a tongue of pure anguish, a language of astonishment and fury that they did not understand. There was no delicacy to her quivering voice—it was a language of horns and hooves and tusks. She called out to the cattle feeding near the old rice fields and to the great hogs, wild and black, who grazed in the center of the island.
Near the house, the calf, Bathsheba, that Lindsay had helped bring into the world, had strayed far away from her mother. The calf was new to this language herself and knew only a few words of that secret speech which held all the mysteries of the new world of pastures and grass. But she knew that something was terribly wrong in the white house and she raced on thin, unsteady legs down the main road that cut through the center of the island. She ran swiftly until she broke out of the forest and saw the herd grazing and ran directly up to the bull, Intrepid, who grazed alone, away from the herd.
The bull appraised her sullenly. “What do you mean by this, daughter? Get back to your mother.”
“Girl,” the calf said, out of breath.
“Girl? What girl? You?” the bull answered, stamping his foot in the grass.
“The blue-eyed girl.”
“You mean our girl. Lindsay. She of the herd.”
“Yes. The girl of the herd.”
“What about her? Speak well and quickly.”
“Help.”
“Help what, daughter? Help whom? Help when?”
“The girl says help. The girl said that she needed the herd.”
There was a sound of distress in the herd and Intrepid looked up in time to see the boar, Dreadnought, moving swiftly toward the calf. The bull moved between the boar and the herd and lowered his horns in warning.
“Swine,” the bull said.
The old hog stopped, hideous and cruel, despised by the cows. Behind him, coming out of the trees, his tribe appeared, their tusks shining like lances in the sunlight.
“What’s this I hear? What about the girl?”
“She’s our girl. She belongs to the herd,” the bull said.
“She loves the swine,” Dreadnought insisted.
“She loves the cattle,” the bull said fiercely.
“Both,” said the calf, Bathsheba. “That is what the girl said. She loves both. She said help.”
Then the language of the swine and the cattle commingled and the hooved animals began to move in awful symmetry toward the house on the river. Dreadnought and Intrepid marched at the head of their formidable regiment. Ahead, they could hear the baying of dogs swarming onto the bridge that led to the island.
Blaise looked to her daughter Lindsay, bleeding on the floor. She glanced at the three armed men and smelled their evil in the room like some debased flower. Outside she saw the river peacefully flowing as it always had.
She said to the men, “I’ll go into the room with all of you if you’ll leave my daughters alone. If you won’t harm us.”
“You ain’t got a choice, lady,” the big man said, grabbing her by the blouse and tearing it at the shoulder. Then the small girl, Sharon, advanced toward the man.
“You leave my house,” she said as she moved forward, but she began stuttering in a fabulous, newly learned language unintelligible to the humans in the room.
The garden spider moved like a dancer up his gleaming web, mounted a windowsill of the house, and peered into the living room. He heard Sharon’s words, then turned to sound the alarm. He felt his web tremble beneath him and he saw the yellow wings of a monarch butterfly fluttering against the invisible netting. He moved toward the butterfly in the terrifying ancient approach of spiders and the butterfly sang her deathsong into the air. The spider touched the butterfly with his black legs, and gently set the monarch free. The butterfly rose, dazzled and puzzled, into the air.
“Send the alarm, monarch. The girl is in trouble.”
The butterfly flew high above the island and began to hum the forest melody of distress. She heard the spider screaming from his web a cry of alarm. The ants heard. The cicadas heard. A million bees left their hives and the business of flowers and flew toward the house. Wasps droned like fighter planes through the trees. A gull heard the warning of the monarch and took up the cry of birds and the air around the island darkened with the angry wings of sea birds.
The swine, the cattle, and the dogs were all racing full speed toward the house and all noticed that the leaves were alive with movement, that the trees streamed with insects, that the forest floor swarmed with a countless flow of insects, that the little ones were flowing like a river toward the house. The forest moved; the earth moved.
The big man pushed Blaise roughly toward the back of the house. The three girls screamed for him to stop. The men laughed at them. They laughed hard. They laughed until they heard the noise outside. It began as a low, eerie hum but rose in pitch and frenzy. The men glanced at one another, puzzled by the strange noise. It sounded like the dawn of creation when all the creatures of the world were trying out their new voices for the first time. All the fear and glory of Eden burst into a song of vengeance around the house by the river. Swift deer mounted by the ghosts of Indian boys patrolled the river’s edge. The sky was black with wings. The grass was covered with insects of every hue. The herd bellowed. The swine thundered. Birds screamed.
The men in the house froze,
The girls continued to speak in their new tongues.
&
nbsp; “Kill them” was the translation of all three. “Kill them.”
The big man, holding his pistol aloft, crept to the window and looked out. He looked out and screamed. The scream was easily translatable. He screamed out of fear. The other two men joined him and their screams echoed his.
“They are mine,” thundered Intrepid, the bull.
“Let us have them,” commanded Dreadnought, the boar.
“The bees and the wasps will make short work of them,” a small voice buzzed.
“The dogs will rip them apart,” a hound said.
“The birds will feed them to the fishes,” an old gull cried, hovering.
What the men saw from the window was the whole kingdom of nature rising out of the light to meet them. They did not see the silent army of fire ants streaming through the cracks of doors, moving up their pants legs, across their shirts. They did not see the spiders dropping like parachutists from the ceiling into their hair, or the wasps adhering like clothespins to the back of their shirts.
They were transfixed by the nearness of their own deaths. The air filled up with the dreadful language of beasts, the beating of wings, the stamping of hooves, the rattle of horns, the rustle of insects, the anger of hives, the arrival of straggling hounds. In the last moments they were permitted to understand, to translate, but not to react. There is no mercy in the forest. That is not the way.
The garden spider moved up the big man’s shirt, climbing along his spine. When he reached the neck, he chose a soft place beneath the ear. He bade farewell to Sharon and sent his venom shooting into the man’s bloodstream. The man screamed and killed the spider with a single blow, but then all the wasps, noting the signal, drilled into flesh and the ants set the men on fire. They staggered around the room, beating at their bodies. They rushed for the front door, toward the amazing noise, opened it, and stumbled into the hooves and fangs and wings and jaws.
Blaise and her daughters sat on the sofa and listened to the cries of the three men. Blaise would not let her daughters near the windows. Because they were human, they felt pity for the men. But there was nothing they could do now except refuse to watch. After a while the screaming stopped. Then the island was silent again.
When Blaise looked out the window, she saw only grass and water and sky. There was not a single trace of the men, not a piece of clothing, a sliver of bone, or a lock of hair.
That evening they buried the spider in the family cemetery for pets. They prayed for his soul and that his webs would spin out for thousands of miles, connecting planets and stars, and that angels would sleep in his silk and that his weavings would always please God.
Two days later, Gregory McKissick’s boat drifted onto Cumberland Island in Georgia. When he returned to his house he told the story of floating for weeks at sea. He would have died, he said, except for a single black-backed gull who always dropped fish into his boat from the sky.
After his return, the house became complete again. The girls grew older and gradually lost their gift. They never spoke about the day the three men came. Rose continued to care for lost dogs her whole life. Lindsay never lost her affection for cattle and swine. Sharon retained her love of birds and insects all her days. They loved nature and they loved their family. They heard their mother singing again. All of them led good lives.
It was their way.
20
Whenever I am angry, my displeasure is written in code on my mouth in a thin-lipped, downturned crescent. I have perfect control of the rest of my face but my mouth is the renegade that broadcasts my vexation and wrath to the outside world. Friends who have mastered the art of reading my mouth can chart the emotional weather of my soul with uncanny accuracy. Because of it I can never take either comrades or enemies by surprise, no matter how vital the enterprise between us. They can decide for themselves to retreat or advance against me. In anger, my mouth is a hideous thing.
But even when I was not incensed, I was no match for Susan Lowenstein’s impenetrable composure. She could accommodate my anger by a strategic withdrawal into the snows of her impeccable breeding. Whenever I attacked her, she drew back into the vast and confident reaches of her intelligence. She could wither me with her brown eyes that served as rose windows illuminating memories of some prehistoric ice age. When I lost control, those eyes made me feel like an aberration of nature, a hurricane approaching a battened-down coastal town. When calm, I felt that I could face Dr. Lowenstein as an equal; when aroused, I knew she could make me feel like a perfect southern asshole.
My mouth twisted in a torque of exquisite displeasure as I confronted Dr. Lowenstein and threw the children’s book across the coffee table toward the therapist.
“Okay, Lowenstein,” I said, taking my seat, “let’s cut out all the formal little courtesies like ‘Did you have a nice weekend?’ and get directly to the point. Who the fuck is Renata and what does she have to do with my sister?”
“Did you have a nice weekend, Tom?” she asked.
“I’m going to report you to the proper authorities, Lowenstein, and get your license suspended. You have no right to hide anything about my sister from me.”
“I see,” she said.
“So spit it out, Doctor. Give it to me straight and you might be able to salvage your endangered career.”
“Tom,” she said, “you must know how much I like you on normal occasions. But I find you rather repulsive whenever you feel threatened or insecure.”
“I feel threatened and insecure twenty-four hours of every day, Doctor. But that’s not the point. I just want to know who Renata is. Renata is the key, isn’t she? If I understand about Renata, then I’ll understand why I’ve been staying in New York this summer. You’ve known about Renata the whole time, haven’t you, Susan? You’ve known about her all the time and you’ve chosen not to tell me.”
“Savannah chose not to tell you, Tom,” Dr. Lowenstein said. “I was merely acceding to her wishes.”
“But it would help me to understand what’s wrong with Savannah, wouldn’t it, Susan? Do you deny that?”
“It might help you to understand, Tom. I’m not sure.”
“Then you owe me an explanation, Lowenstein.”
“Savannah can tell you herself when the time is right. She specifically made me promise that I would not talk to you about Renata.”
“But that was before I knew that Renata had some connection with my sister. And, I mean, Dr. Lowenstein, we are talking about a bizarre connection. Savannah’s now writing books and poems and publishing them under Renata’s name.”
“Who told you about the children’s book, Tom?”
I ignored her question and said, “I called Renata’s house in Brooklyn and found out that Renata had hit the tracks and gone one-on-one with an incoming train two years ago. Renata’s mother described the suicide to me. That leads to several conclusions. Either Renata faked a suicide and loves torturing her nice Brooklyn mama or something rather odd is going on in my sister’s head.”
“Have you read the children’s book?” Dr. Lowenstein asked.
“Of course I read the book.”
“What do you think?”
“What the hell do you think I think?” I said. “It’s about my goddamn family.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not an idiot. Because I can read and because I can see a thousand things in that story that Savannah and only Savannah could know. I can understand why Savannah used a pen name for this story, Susan—my mother would flip her gourd if she ever read this thing. Savannah wouldn’t have to commit suicide. My mother would rip her pancreas out with her teeth. Now who is Renata? I want to know what her relationship to Savannah is. Are they lovers? You can tell me. Savannah’s had female lovers before. I’ve met them and broken pita bread with them and served them bean sprout sandwiches and fed them soup with potato-peel base. She’s been attracted to the wimpiest males and females on the continent. I don’t care who she’s screwing. But I demand some explanation.
You haven’t let me see Savannah in weeks. Why? There’s got to be a reason. Is Renata the one who hurt Savannah? If she is, I’ll find her and kick the shit out of her.”
“You’d hit a woman,” she asked. “How surprising.”
“If she was hurting my sister, I’d punch her fucking guts out.”
“Renata was a friend of Savannah’s. That’s all I’m going to tell you.”
“No shit. Look, I don’t deserve this from you. I’ve done everything you’ve asked. I’ve told you every story I can remember about my family and I …”
“You’re lying, Tom,” she said evenly.
“What do you mean I’m lying?”
“You haven’t told me all the stories. You haven’t told me all the ones that really count. You’ve given me the history of your family as you would like to remember and preserve it. Grandpa was a real character and Grandma was a real eccentric. Dad was a little odd and he’d whip us when he got drunk but Mom was a princess and held us all together with her love.”
“I haven’t gotten to the end of the story, Susan,” I said. “I’m trying to put it all into a context. You handed me a bunch of tapes with Savannah screaming out gibberish the first day I met you. Some of it is meaningless to me. I am trying to put it in order, but I can’t tell you the ending unless you understand the origins.”
“You’re even lying about the beginnings.”
“How do you know? One thing I’m perfectly sure of is that I know what happened to my family a lot better than you do.”
“Perhaps you just know one version of it better and that’s all. It’s an instructive version and it’s been helpful. But the things you leave out, Tom, are every bit as important as the things you leave in. Talk to me less about the Huck Finns you and your brother were and tell me a little more about the girl who spent her life setting the table. It’s that girl I want to know about, Tom.”
“She’s talking,” I said. “Savannah’s talking and you’re not letting me see her.”
“You know Savannah made the decision not to see you, Tom. But your stories about your childhood have been exceptionally helpful to her. They’ve helped her remember things she repressed long ago.”
