The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  We walked from the church to the cemetery. I held Sallie’s hand and Luke walked with my mother. Savannah helped my father with Tolitha. The whole town, black and white, moved in solemn processional silence behind us. The men with the crosses dragged them down the center of the street. Mr. Fruit led the entourage, tooting his whistle with tears streaming down his face. Patrolman Sasser was one of the pallbearers.

  We buried him in the paltry light of an overcast day. After they lowered Amos into his grave, Luke, Savannah, and I stayed behind to shovel the dirt ourselves. It took us an hour to get it right. When we had finished we sat beneath the water oak that shaded the Wingo family plot. We cried and we told stories about Amos and his role in our childhood. Our grandfather, in dreamless sleep beneath us, spoke to us from the singing hive of memory. There is an art to farewell, but we were too young to have mastered it. We simply told stories about the man who had cut our hair since we were children and who had fashioned out of his life an incorruptible psalm to the God who made him.

  Finally, Savannah said, “I still say, with all due respect, that Grandpa was crazy.”

  “That’s all due respect?” Luke asked.

  “Remember, Luke, Grandpa used to talk to Jesus on a daily basis,” she said. “That’s not what psychiatrists refer to as normal behavior.”

  “Hell, you talk to dogs and angels on a daily basis,” Luke said, angrily. “I think it’s a hell of a lot more normal to talk to Jesus.”

  “That was mean, Luke,” said Savannah, her eyes downcast and misty. “I don’t want you to make light of my problems. I’m having a very difficult time. I’m always going to have a hard time.”

  “He didn’t mean anything by it, Savannah,” I said.

  “I shouldn’t have come down here,” she said. “It’s bad for me to be around my family. It’s dangerous.”

  “Why is it dangerous?” I asked. “Is that why we hardly ever see you, Savannah?”

  “The dynamic of this family is hideous,” she answered. “It’s going to catch up to you boys some day just like it caught up with me.”

  “What are you talking about, Savannah?” Luke asked. “We were just talking so nice about Grandpa and now you have to ruin it by talking about your latest shrink-of-the-month-club bullshit.”

  “You’re next, Luke,” she said. “You’ve got it written all over you.”

  “Next for what?” he asked.

  “Neither of you has faced what really happened in our childhood and because you’re both southern males, there’s a great chance you’ll never face it.”

  “I apologize for being a southern male, Savannah,” Luke said. “What do you want me to be, an Eskimo? A Japanese pearl diver?”

  “I want you to look around you and see what’s happening, Luke,” she said evenly. “You and Tom aren’t even aware of what’s going on right this minute.”

  “You’ve got to excuse us, Savannah,” I said, my temper rising congruently with Luke’s. “We’re just southern males.”

  “Why do you hate women, Luke?” she asked. “Why don’t you ever go out on dates? Why have you never been seriously involved with a woman in your whole life? Have you ever asked yourself these questions?”

  “I don’t hate women,” he said, and there was authentic pain in his voice. “I just don’t understand them, honey. I just don’t know what they think or why they think it.”

  “What about you, Tom?” she asked. “How do you feel about women?”

  “Me?” I said, “I hate their guts. I think women are the fucking scum of the earth. That’s why I married one of them and had three daughters. Hatred was the central driving force behind it all.”

  “I can understand why you’re so defensive,” Savannah said in perfect control of herself.

  “I’m not being defensive,” I disagreed. “Luke and I are reacting to your insufferable piety, Savannah. Every time we see you we have to hear lectures about how we’re wasting our lives down here while you’re up in New York living a fruitful, self-actualizing, fabulous existence among the most gifted minds of our time.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I just have a better perspective since I only get home every couple of years. I see things immediately that you can’t see because you’re so close to them. Have any of you talked to Mom lately?”

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “Every single day of my life.”

  “Do you know what she’s thinking?” Savannah asked, ignoring the irony in Luke’s voice. “Do you have any idea what she’s planning to do?”

  “She spends every single waking moment nursing that poor bitch Isabel Newbury,” Luke said. “She’s usually so exhausted when she gets home that she can barely do anything except fall into bed.”

  “Sallie looks unhappy, Tom,” Savannah said without skipping a beat. “She looks exhausted.”

  “She’s a doctor and a mother, Savannah,” I said. “It’s tough being one, much less both. Especially when the father teaches school and coaches three sports.”

  “Well, at least she doesn’t have to be a housewife the rest of her life,” she said.

  “What in the hell do you have against housewives?” I said.

  “I was raised by one,” Savannah said. “And it almost ruined my life.”

  “I got knocked around by a shrimper when I was a kid,” said Luke, “but I never blamed the shrimp.”

  “Mom’s going to divorce Dad,” Savannah said. “That’s what she told me last night.”

  “That’s a news bulletin?” Luke said. “How many times in our life has Mom said that?”

  “Not many,” I replied. “I don’t think she’s said it more than sixty-eight million times.”

  “How many times,” Luke continued, “did Mom put us in the car, drive off the island, and swear to us that she would never live another night in Henry Wingo’s house?”

  “Not many,” I said again. “That didn’t happen but twenty or thirty times when we were kids.”

  “Where was she going to go?” Savannah asked. “How was she going to feed or clothe us? How was she going to survive without a man? Mom was trapped by the South and it made her a little mean. But I think she’s going to leave him this time. She’s filing for a divorce next week. She’s hired a lawyer and he’s drawing up the papers.”

  “Has she told Dad yet?” I asked.

  “No,” Savannah answered.

  “Hey, first things first, Tom,” said Luke.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that Mom has made this important decision and none of you know about it?” she said. “Doesn’t it say something about the way this family communicates?”

  “Savannah,” said Luke, “why do you always come down to South Carolina just waiting to tell me and Tom how to live our lives? He and I don’t breathe a word about how you live your life, but you got a thousand things to say about what we do. We were here saying goodbye to Grandpa and you’ve got to turn it into a group therapy session. If Mom is going to leave Dad, then that’s their business and it’ll be up to me and Tom to help get them through the best way we know how. You’ll be up in New York, calling us on the telephone, telling us what a shitty job of it we’re doing.”

  “I hate communication, Savannah,” I said. “Every time we communicate with you these days we end up fighting. Whenever I find myself communicating with a member of my family, I always find out more than I want to . . . or much less.”

  “You don’t care that Mom is divorcing Dad?” she asked.

  “Yes, I care a great deal,” I said. “Now that Dad no longer hits me or has an ounce of power over me, I find him merely pathetic. I grew up hating his guts because I was always afraid in his house and because it’s difficult to forgive anyone who’s robbed you of your childhood. But I have forgiven him, Savannah. I’ve also forgiven Mom.”

  “I can’t forgive either one of them,” said Savannah. “There’s too much damage. I have to deal with their mistakes every day.”

  “They didn’t mean nothing by it,” Luke sa
id, putting his arm around Savannah and pulling her against his chest. “They were just assholes and they didn’t even know how to be good assholes. They just kind of fumbled around at it.”

  “I didn’t mean to jump on you boys so hard,” she said. “I’m always afraid this town is going to drag you down to its level.”

  “It’s not a sin to love Colleton,” Luke said. “The only real sin is not loving it enough. That’s what Grandpa used to say.”

  “Look where it got him,” Savannah said, nodding toward his grave.

  “Heaven isn’t such a bad place to be,” Luke answered.

  “You know you don’t believe in heaven,” she said.

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I’m already there, Savannah. That’s the big difference between you and me. Colleton’s all I’ve ever wanted and all I’ve ever needed.”

  “There’s no excitement here, no dazzle, no surge of the crowds, no stimulation,” she said.

  “What did you think at Grandpa’s funeral when those six deacons began pounding their crosses on the floor when you gave your eulogy?” I asked.

  “I thought they were nuts,” she answered.

  “But it was sure stimulating, wasn’t it?” Luke said.

  “No, it was just nuts,” she said. “And it made me want to run out of this town as fast as my two legs could carry me.”

  “They were just letting everyone know how much they thought about Grandpa, Savannah,” Luke said. “They were telling everyone they loved him.”

  “It might make a good poem,” she said, thinking aloud. “ ‘The Cross-Beaters,’ I could call it.”

  “Did you finish that poem about Grandpa’s ski trip yet?” I asked.

  “About,” she answered. “It still needs work.”

  “What’s taking you so long?” Luke asked.

  “You can’t rush art,” she answered.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You stupid son of a bitch. You can’t rush art.”

  Savannah ignored us both and rose to her feet and said, “We’ve got to say goodbye to Grandpa.”

  “Over there’s where we’re going to be buried,” said Luke, walking to a plot of bare grass. “This plot is for me. Those are for you two and there’s even enough room for our wives and children.”

  “How morbid and depressing, Luke,” Savannah said.

  “I find it comforting to know where I’ll end up after I turn up my toes,” Luke said.

  “I’m going to be cremated and have my ashes scattered over the tomb of John Keats in Rome,” said Savannah.

  “A modest request,” I said.

  “No, little sister,” Luke said amiably. “I’m bringing you right down to Colleton and planting your ass right here so I can keep an eye on you.”

  “How grotesque,” she said.

  “Let’s get back to the house,” I suggested. “Most of the fevered brains will have gone by now.”

  “Bye-bye, Grandpa,” Savannah said softly, blowing a kiss downward toward the freshly turned earth. “If it wasn’t for you and Tolitha, I don’t know what would have happened to us.”

  “If you ain’t in heaven, Grandpa,” said Luke as we began walking out of the cemetery, “then it’s all bullshit.”

  I lived in a county without snow or rhododendrons. I lived out my twenties as a coach of both awkward and agile boys. I divided the seasons in the annulling fluency of sports. There was the music of punted footballs spiraling toward clouds in autumn, the squeak of rubber against shining wood as tall boys pivoted toward the basket in winter, and the crack of Hillerich and Bradsby ash bats against baseballs in late spring. Coaching was not a mislaid passion. At its best, it was the art of giving meaning to a boy’s childhood. I was not the best of coaches, but I was not a harmful one either. I figured greatly in no boy’s nightmare. Never once did I defeat those awesomely disciplined football teams of the great John McKissick of Summerville. He was a maker of dynasties and I was a coach limited in purview and scope. I had neither a quarrel with nor addiction to winning. I had played on teams that had done both and though winning was better, it lacked that brittle sublimity, that slight wisdom one took from a game in which you played with all your heart and your effort fell short. I taught my boys that losing well was a gift, but that winning well was the stuff of authentic manhood. Losing, I told them, was good for your sense of proportion.

  I tried to live well in that county without snow or rhododendrons. I took up bird watching, became an amateur butterfly collector, set gill nets for the annual run of shad, and collected Bach and Carolina beach music. I became one of those anonymous Americans who tries to keep his mind sharp and inquisitive while performing all the humiliating rituals of the middle class. I subscribed to five magazines at the teacher discount rate: The New Yorker, Gourmet, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. I thought my choices of magazines indicated a thoughtful, liberal man with a variety of interests. It never once occurred to me that those carefully considered choices revealed the irrefutable fact that I was both a joke and a cliché of my times. Savannah would send me boxes of books she had bought from Barnes & Noble. She believed I had traded in my mind when I decided to remain in the South. She had a grocer’s faith in books; they could be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts. I know Savannah worried about me and the fatal attraction I had for the conventional and the safe. I think she was wrong about me; my disease was much stranger. I brought to my adult life a nostalgia for a lost childhood. I longed to raise my children in a South stolen from me by my mother and father. What I wanted most was a life of vigorous quality. I had some knowledge to pass on to my children and it had nothing to do with great cities. Savannah did not understand that I had a burning need to be a decent man and nothing more. When I died, I wanted Sallie to say when she kissed me for the last time, “I chose the right man.” It was the one fire that sustained me, the one idea I consigned as first principle of my life as a man. That I failed, I think, had less to do with me than with the raw obliquity of circumstance. When I chose to return to Colleton, I had no idea, and I would have laughed had it been suggested, that Colleton would cease to be an incorporated township in South Carolina. I was about to learn much about my century. I would like none of it.

  Three weeks after my grandfather’s funeral, I saw my father’s truck parked outside my house when I returned from football practice. He had a bumper sticker on the back of his truck picturing a peace symbol followed by these words: “This is the footprint of the American chicken.” He was sitting in the living room talking to Sallie when I entered the house. Jennifer was sitting in my father’s lap and Sallie was changing Lucy’s diapers on the couch.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. “Can I fix you a drink?”

  “Sure, son. Anything you’ve got is fine with me.”

  Sallie came into the kitchen when I made the drinks and I said, “You want me to fix you one, Sallie, or do you want to wait until we get these tigers to bed?”

  “Something’s happened,” Sallie whispered. “He was crying just a minute ago.”

  “My father? Crying?” I said in a low voice. “That’s impossible. Only human beings cry when they become emotionally upset. My father was born without emotions like some people are born without little fingers.”

  “You be nice to him, Tom,” she said. “You be real nice. I’m going to take the girls over to Tolitha’s house. He wants to talk to you alone.”

  “Let us go somewhere, Sallie,” I said. “It’s easier for us.”

  “He needs to talk now,” she answered, and she went to gather up the children.

  When I returned to the living room, I found my father sitting with his head resting on the back of the armchair. He was breathing heavily and more distraught than I had ever seen him. He looked like he was strapped to an electric chair. His hands shivered and his knuckles were purple.

  “How’s the team coming along?” he asked as I handed him his drink.

  “They’re doing real well, Dad,” I ans
wered. “I think we have a real good chance against Georgetown.”

  “Can I talk to you, son?” he asked.

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “Your mother moved out on me a couple of days ago,” he said, and each word came hard. “I didn’t think much of it at first. I mean, we have our ups and downs just like all couples, but we usually patch it up pretty quick. But I got served with papers by the sheriff today. She wants a divorce.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.

  “Has she spoken to you about it?” he asked. “Did you know this was coming?”

  “Savannah told me something about it after Grandpa’s funeral,” I said. “I didn’t think too much about it, Dad.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, son?” he said in a wounded voice. “I could have bought her some flowers or taken her to a fancy restaurant in Charleston.”

  “I didn’t think it was any of my business,” I said. “I thought it had to be worked out by the two of you.”

  “None of your business!” he shouted. “I’m your father and she’s your mother. If it’s not your goddamn business, then whose is it? What in the hell am I gonna do if she leaves me, Tom? Can you tell me that? What good is my goddamn life without your mother? Why in the hell do you think I worked so hard all my life? I wanted to give her all the things she always dreamed of. Not everything worked out like I hoped it would, but I always gave it the old college try.”

  “You did try,” I said. “No one can ever deny that.”

  “If I had hit paydirt just once, she’d never have left me,” he said. “You have no idea how your mother loves money.”