by Pat Conroy
At four in the morning Luke made it to the edge of the Pacific. He watched a patrol pass him heading north, their rifles locked and loaded. He let them get three-quarters of a mile down the beach before he walked in a straight line to the ocean without looking to his right or left. If someone saw his bold move to the water, he figured he was a dead man. But if he waited for daylight he had no chance at all. He reached the water and hurled Blackstock over a wave and dove in after him. It took him fifteen minutes to get past the breakers and into open water. But once he was in the water, he knew he had entered his element at last and that no one presently living in North Vietnam could ever take Luke Wingo in salt water.
When he hit the open sea, he checked the stars and tried to get his bearings. Then he swam three miles, towing Lieutenant jg Christopher Blackstock behind him. He was picked up by an American patrol boat at eleven o’clock the next morning after being in the water for six and a half hours.
Luke was called before the admiral of the Pacific Fleet to give his account. Luke reported that the pilot was not in the wreckage of his plane and that Lieutenant Blackstock had confirmed that visually. They did not know if the pilot was dead, captured, or had bailed out prior to crashing. Then, they had encountered heavy enemy resistance and were involved in a fire fight on the way back to the beach. Lieutenant Blackstock had been killed by rifle fire. Luke had obeyed his orders and returned to the general staging area of his mission.
“Sailor,” the admiral asked Luke, “why did you bring Lieutenant Blackstock’s body back to the ship with you if you knew he was dead?”
“We learned it during training, Admiral,” Luke said.
“Learned what?”
“SEALs don’t leave their dead,” Luke answered.
When Luke returned to Colleton at the end of his tour of duty, we sat on that same wooden bridge where we had celebrated our graduation from high school. Luke had won a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars.
“Did you learn to hate the North Vietnamese, Luke?” I asked him as I passed the bottle of Wild Turkey to him. “Did you hate the Viet Cong?”
“No,” he said, “I admired them, Tom. Those folks are good farmers. Good fishermen, too.”
“But they killed your friends. They killed Blackstock.”
“When I was in the rice field, Tom,” Luke said, “I figured I was the first white man who had ever been to that field. I had come armed with a submachine gun. They were right to try to kill me. I had no business being there.”
“Then what were you fighting for?” I asked.
“I was fighting because I live in a country where they put you in jail if you tell them you won’t fight. I was earning my right to get back to Colleton,” he said. “And I’m never going to leave this island again. I’ve earned the right to stay here for the rest of my life.”
“We’re lucky in America,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about a war on our own soil.”
“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “The world is a terribly fucked up place.”
“Nothing ever happens in Colleton,” I said.
“That’s what I love about Colleton,” he answered. “It’s like the whole world is happening for the first time. It’s like being born in Eden.”
25
Though my parents’ marriage could serve as a field manual on the art of misalliance, I thought the mere force of habit had made it indestructible. As I grew older and began raising my own children, I ceased noticing the steady erosion of any respect my mother might once have felt for my father. With her children grown, my mother turned her formidable energies to projects outside her home. By growing up, we had committed the crime of blurring those distinctions by which my mother defined herself; we also provided her manumission from the narrowness of that flawed self-definition. My mother had waited her whole life for that proper moment when her instincts for power and intrigue could be fully tested in the crucible of small town life. When her time approached, she was not found wanting. With her beauty alone, Lila Wingo could have troubled the licentious dreams of kings. But with her beauty and her cunning she could have inspired anarchists and regicides to bring her the heads of a dozen kings, garnished with parsley and roses, on pale blue Wedgwood plates.
Later, we would wonder aloud whether my mother had planned for years to make her spectacular break with the past or had operated with a freestyle genius and seized the opportunity as events unfolded around her. We had long suspected that she was a brilliant woman, but it was only Savannah who was not surprised that my mother would prove to be a bold and unscrupulous one. She never apologized and never explained. She did what she was born to do, and my mother was never one to indulge in sudden flights of honesty or self-examination.
With an impressive command of tactics, she proved herself the designated terrorist of beauty, the queen of the bloodless auto-da-fé, and, in the process, she ate Henry Wingo alive. But the price she paid was high.
In her hour of greatest triumph, when all honors and kudos and riches had accrued to her at last, when she had proven to all that we had underestimated her value and importance, my father went to prison in a last grand gesture to win her admiration and they brought my mother the head of her oldest son on a plate. It would be my mother’s destiny to know the dust, and not the savor, of answered prayers.
One day in 1971 I was shrimping with Luke on the ocean side of the Coosaw Flats, heading a little south of east, when the call came in from my mother.
“Captain Wingo. Captain Luke Wingo. Come in Captain. Out,” she said.
“Hello, Mama. Out,” he said.
“Tell Tom he’s about to become a daddy. And congratulations. Out.”
“I’ll be right there, Mama. Out,” I screamed into the radio.
“This also means I’m about to become a grandmother. Out,” my mother said.
“Congratulations, Grandma. Out.”
“I don’t find you amusing, son. Out,” my mother said.
“Congratulations, Tom. Out,” my father said over the radio.
“Congratulations, Tom,” ten other shrimp boat captains radioed in as I struggled to get the nets in and Luke turned the boat toward Colleton.
When we passed the hospital, which sat on the river just south of town, Luke steered the boat close to the river’s edge and I dove into the river. I swam to shore, scrambled up the bank, and raced into the maternity ward dripping seawater. A nurse brought me a towel and a hospital bathrobe and I held Sallie’s hand until Dr. Keyserling said it was time and they wheeled her away to the delivery room.
That night Jennifer Lynn Wingo was born at 11:25, weighing in at seven pounds, two ounces. Every shrimper on the river sent flowers and every teacher in the high school came to see the baby. My grandfather brought her a white Bible the next morning and filled out her family tree in the middle of the book.
Down the hall from Sallie, my mother found a sick and frightened Isabel Newbury, who had entered the hospital for tests that day after passing blood in her stool. Mrs. Newbury was terrified and could not eat hospital food and my mother began bringing her meals to the hospital whenever she visited Sallie and the baby. It was not until she was transferred to Charleston that the preliminary diagnosis of intestinal cancer was corroborated. It was my mother who drove Mrs. Newbury to Charleston for the tests, and it was my mother who comforted Mrs. Newbury during her terrible ordeal of surgery. Of all my children, my mother always preferred Jennifer, not because she was first born, but because it was her birth that led directly to my mother’s great and accidental friendship with Isabel Newbury.
No one could say for sure when the quiet bands of surveyors, with their tapes and transits, invaded our county and began the long study of its metes and bounds. But most agree that it was the same summer that my grandfather, Amos Wingo, had his driver’s license suspended by the State Highway Department. Amos had always been a heroically bad driver even as a young man, but as he grew older and his faculties dimmed he became a menace to every living creatu
re who stepped upon a macadam surface in the lowcountry. Because of an uncharacteristic vanity, he refused to wear his eyeglasses, nor did he think he should be held responsible for running red lights he did not see.
“They put them up too high,” he explained about the traffic lights. “I’m not bird watching when I drive. I’ve got my eye on the road and my mind on the Lord.”
“You almost ran Mr. Fruit down last week,” I said to him. “They said he had to dive off the road to keep from getting hit, Grandpa.”
“I didn’t see no Mr. Fruit,” Amos answered. “He’s always been too puny a man to direct traffic anyway. They should only let fat men have that job. Mr. Fruit should specialize now that he’s getting older. He should only be allowed to lead parades.”
“Patrolman Sasser said he caught you up on the Charleston Highway driving along on the wrong side of the road,” I said.
“Sasser!” my grandfather fumed. “I was driving a gasoline-powered automobile before that boy was born. I told that boy I was looking at a field chock-full of cowbirds and that I was appreciating the world God put down here for man to appreciate. Besides, there was nothing coming down the other side of the road, so what’s all the fuss about?”
“I ought to just go ahead and put him in a home,” my grandmother said. “He’s going to kill somebody in that automobile.”
“I got the body of a man half my age,” my grandfather said, hurt.
My grandmother answered, “We’re talking about gray matter, Amos. It’s like living with Methuselah, Tom. He can’t remember where he puts his teeth at night. I found them in the refrigerator the other day.”
“They want you to turn in your license voluntarily, Grandpa,” I said.
“There’s getting to be too much government in Colleton,” my grandfather said. “I never heard of such.”
“Will you give me your license, Grandpa?” I asked. “Or else Sasser is going to drive out here to get it.”
“I’ll consider it directly,” he said. “I’ll discuss it with the Lord.”
“See, Tom?” Tolitha said. “I’m going to have to put him in a home.”
After a lengthy discussion of the issue, to no one’s astonishment, Jesus allowed that my grandfather should keep his driver’s license, but should always wear his glasses. To Amos, the Lord was everything: traffic controller, mediator, and optometrist.
Two days later my grandfather ran over Mr. Fruit on the same corner. Wearing his glasses, my grandfather had turned to observe the team of surveyors who were measuring the boundary lines of the property adjacent to Baitery Street and the Street of Tides. Amos neither saw the red light nor heard Mr. Fruit’s frantic toots on the whistle and only when he heard Mr. Fruit crash down on the hood of his 1950 Ford did my grandfather put on the brakes. Mr. Fruit suffered only minor bruises and abrasions but the State Patrol was no longer amused by my grandfather’s high jinks behind the wheel of a car.
Patrolman Sasser seized Amos’s driver’s license on the spot and cut it into pieces with the scissors of a small Swiss Army knife.
“I was driving before you were born, young Sasser,” my grandfather complained.
“And I want to live to be an old man just like you, Mr. Wingo,” Sasser replied. “But there ain’t gonna be anybody alive in this county if I don’t get you off the road, sir. Face facts, Mr. Wingo. You are infirm, sir, and a menace to society.”
“Infirm!” my grandfather said indignantly as Mr. Fruit wailed in terror and the ambulance rescue squad pulled up with its siren going full blast.
“I’m doing you a favor, Mr. Wingo,” Sasser said, “and I’m protecting the public weal.”
“Infirm!” my grandfather repeated. “Let’s arm-wrestle, Sasser, and we’ll see who’s infirm and the whole town can be the judge.”
“No, sir,” said Sasser. “I’m going to the hospital to make sure Mr. Fruit is okay.”
My mother, walking down to Long’s Pharmacy to fill some prescriptions for the critically ill Isabel Newbury, witnessed the entire confrontation between my grandfather and Patrolman Sasser. She had ducked into Woolworth’s as soon as she heard Mr. Fruit scream and saw Amos’s Ford screech to a halt. She did not like to be a witness when a Wingo made a horse’s ass out of himself in public. Later, we learned that she was the only man or woman on the Street of Tides that day who knew why there were surveying teams the length and breadth of Colleton County.
The following week, Grandpa Wingo wrote a letter to the Colleton Gazette complaining of the cavalier treatment he had received at the hands of Patrolman Sasser, his outrage at having his driver’s license destroyed in public by a Swiss Army knife, and his intention to prove to both Sasser and Colleton he was not “infirm.” He announced that he would water-ski the forty-mile length of the inland waterway between Savannah, Georgia, and Colleton and challenged that “young pup” Sasser to ski alongside him. If he completed the journey, he demanded a public apology from the Highway Department and the immediate reinstatement of his driver’s license.
My grandmother promptly began making serious inquiries about the availability of space in nursing homes across the state. But Luke and I took a weekend off to get the Boston Whaler in shape to make the trip. My grandfather was a simple man, but glorious notions had always kept him from being a dull one. Amos had brought the first pair of water skis to the county and, at fifty, was the first man in South Carolina ever to ski barefooted. For ten years, he held the state ski-jump record until a ringer from Cypress Gardens was imported one year for the Water Festival. But he had not skied for ten years when he issued his proclamation in the newspaper.
“You gonna put wheels on those skis, Grandpa?” Luke teased while he loaded a brand-new pair of Head skis into the boat as we were preparing to haul it to Savannah.
“That’s what gave folks the idea I was slowing down in the first place,” Amos answered. “I should never have put the wheel on the cross.”
“I can drive you anywhere you need to go, Amos,” my grandmother said. “There’s no use proving to the whole world that you’re an idiot. They know you can’t drive worth a lick, but a lot of them don’t know you’re soft in the head.”
“I need to concentrate more when I drive, Tolitha,” my grandfather answered. “I know I make some mistakes behind the wheel, but I was busy listening to the words of the Lord.”
“Did the Lord tell you to water-ski up from Savannah?” my grandmother asked.
“Where do you think I got the idea from?” he said.
“Just asking, Amos,” my grandmother said. “You take good care of your grandpa, boys.”
“We will, Tolitha,” I said.
“I got a hundred bucks riding on you, Dad,” my father said, slapping Amos on the back.
“I don’t approve of betting,” Amos admonished his son.
“Who did you bet, Dad?” Luke asked.
“That little son of a bitch Sasser,” my father said, whooping. “He says he’s going to be waiting at that dock with a new driver’s license already made up, Dad, ’cause he don’t think you’re going to make it as far as Standi Creek.”
“Standi Creek is just over the border about a mile outside of Savannah,” my grandfather said.
“You should have gone to Dr. Keyserling for a checkup,” my grandmother said to Amos. To the rest of us she said, “He hasn’t had a physical in his whole life.”
“You’re going to do it, Amos,” I heard Sallie say. “I can tell. You’re going to do it.”
“Feel that arm, Sallie,” my grandfather said proudly, flexing his biceps. “The Lord didn’t make Wingo men very smart. But he sure made them strong, and he blessed them with mighty fine taste in women.”
“I wish He’d given me better taste in men,” Tolitha said. “You’re making a fool of yourself again, Amos. Lila’s too embarrassed to show her face.”
“Naw, she’s just taking care of Isabel Newbury,” my father said. “She’s been like a saint since Isabel took sick. I’ve hardly seen her
.”
Luke took five twenty-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to my father. “Here’s a hundred bucks, Dad,” he said. “A hundred bucks which says that Amos Wingo is going to ski all the way from Savannah to Colleton. Bet anyone you can.”
“Your sister called me from New York City last night, boys,” Amos said. “She said she was going to put me in one of her poems if I make it.”
“You’ll look like a fool in a bathing suit, Amos,” Tolitha said as we entered the truck.
“Not when I get my brand-new driver’s license in my hand, Tolitha,” he said. “Then I’ll get slicked up and take you for a long ride.”
“I’ll warn Mr. Fruit,” said Tolitha.
These are the moments of surprise and consecration that hold me forever in debt and bondage to the memories I bring to bear from a southern life. I fear emptiness in life, vacuity, boredom, and the hopelessness of a life bereft of action. It is the death-in-life of the middle class that sends a primeval shiver through the nerves and open pores of my soul. If I catch a fish before the sun rises, I have connected myself again to the deep hum of the planet. If I turn on the television because I cannot stand an evening alone with myself or my family, I am admitting my citizenship with the living dead. It is the southern part of me which is most quintessentially and fiercely alive. They are deeply southern memories that surround the lodestar of whatever authenticity I bring to light as a man. Because of our intensity, I belonged to a family with a fatal attraction for the extraordinary gesture. There was always an outrageousness to our response to minor events. Flamboyance and exaggeration were the tail feathers, the jaunty plumage that stretched and flared whenever a Wingo found himself eclipsed in the lampshine of a hostile world. As a family, we were instinctive, not thoughtful. We could never outsmart our adversaries but we could always surprise them with the imaginativeness of our reactions. We functioned best as connoisseurs of hazard and endangerment. We were not truly happy unless we were engaged in our own private war with the rest of the world. Even in my sister’s poems, one could always feel the tension of approaching risk. Her poems all sounded as though she had composed them of thin ice and falling rock. They possessed movement, weight, dazzle and craft. Her poetry moved through streams of time, wild and rambunctious, like an old man entering the boundary waters of the Savannah River, planning to water-ski forty miles to prove he was still a man.
