The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “What do you think you can do, Luke?” my mother asked.

  “I think I can stop them,” he answered.

  “You’re nuts, Luke,” I said, uttering my first words of the evening. “I made a deal with the sheriff. He’ll let you go if you’ll agree to go up to the state mental hospital and turn yourself in for observation for two weeks. I think you should do it.”

  “Why, Tom?” he asked.

  “Because you’re talking crazy, Luke,” I said. “There’s nothing you can do about any of this. It’s a fait accompli. It’s finished and you’ve got to think about starting a new life.”

  “Everyone tells me there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “Human beings just love to roll over on their backs like puppies.”

  “What are you planning to do?” I asked.

  “Register a small protest,” he answered, his hair cottony in the moonlight.

  “It won’t do any good,” I said.

  “That’s true, Tom,” he said, smiling. “So what?”

  “Then why are you doing it?” I said desperately.

  “So I can live with myself,” Luke said. “Why don’t you come with me, Tom? The two of us could give them a run for their money. No one knows these woods and waters better than we do. We could make the Viet Cong look like rookies.”

  “I’ve got a family,” I said angrily. “Or hadn’t you noticed? I’m in a different situation than you.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Your situation is different.”

  “I don’t like your tone of voice when you say that,” I said.

  “It don’t change a thing,” he answered. “You know, Tom, I think you had more promise than any of us. But somewhere along the line you turned from something into not much. And you’ve got a good chance of turning into nothing, nothing at all. A man’s only got so many yeses inside him before he uses them all up.”

  I shouted at him, “I’m saying no to you.”

  “No, little brother,” he said. “You’re just saying yes to them.”

  “You can’t stop the government, Luke,” my mother said.

  Luke turned his sad, luminous eyes toward her; they were like the eyes of an obedient panther.

  He said, “I know, Mama. But I think I can be a worthy opponent.”

  27

  And worthy opponent Luke Wingo became.

  I speak now not as witness but as the troubled gleaner of threads and fragments. I listened well and consolidated the hazes of rumor and innuendo in the single year it took to dissolve my town and family. I kept the inventory of ruin up to date. Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year’s time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance. Blue herons steepled out of marsh grass, agile in their ethereal stillness. A family of otters flowed through whitecaps in the wreck near the bridge and all the dead trees along the river were busy with shy rookeries of egrets. Ospreys brought quivering trout to the fledglings in their hatlike nests high atop telephone poles. Porpoises danced in the channels. The shrimp moved into the creeks to spawn.

  But there was no shrimp fleet to meet them and not a single net interrupted their passage in countless billions toward the swaying acreage of marsh.

  The waters of Colleton, because of security, were made off-limits to shrimpers and fishermen. It was the spring that the town began to move.

  I watched them move the great mansions on the Street of Tides. Hundreds of men with jacks and pulleys and vast inclined planes loosed the great houses from their foundations and with all the cunning and mystery of physics, slid and coaxed those houses toward huge waiting barges in the river. Battened down with steel cable, houses began to move upstream toward Charleston. I saw my mother’s house floating above the tide, looking like the wedding cake of a good king. She and Reese Newbury stood on their verandah, waving to people on the shore. They poured champagne into fine crystal, toasted the town, and threw their glasses into the tawny waters. The bridge opened and my mother and her new house and new husband floated miraculously between the spans in a river suddenly alive with an armada of white-pillared mansions. In the next weeks you could not look down toward the river without seeing a familiar house moving with strange dignity above the marsh, sailing out of the majestic past.

  The highways also became clogged with the traffic of vast trucks moving houses to various destinations around South Carolina. I was startled one day to see a house pass me and I did not realize until several minutes after it had traveled by that I had witnessed the maiden voyage of my grandmother’s house. The steeple of the Baptist church, looking like some great recumbent missile, went by me only minutes later. I took photographs with my Minolta and sent them to Savannah, who wrote a long poem about the unmaking of her town. Through the aperture of my camera, I watched them move the Episcopal church in its entirety. It moved through the twilight so gracefully that it seemed airborne. I photographed the sweating laborers who excavated the boxes of the dead and deported them in plastic bags to new grassless cemeteries along the interstate highway between Charleston and Columbia. If a building could not be moved or sold, it was destroyed and sold for scrap. Stray dogs were shot by hunters with special licenses. Cats were trapped and drowned by the public dock. Tomato plants sprang up wild and useless. Watermelons and cantaloupes rotted on vines in fields beside abandoned cabins. They dynamited the schoolhouse and the courthouse. They tore down every store along the Street of Tides. By September 1, the town of Colleton was as extinct as Pompeii or Herculaneum.

  For the land they expropriated, the government paid out a total of $98,967,000. My mother was paid $2,225,000 for the loss of Melrose Island.

  Alert to the nuances of feeling in her divided family, my mother prepared four cashier’s checks, each one made out for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Savannah and I accepted the checks gratefully. Savannah no longer was imprisoned in the despised role of starving artist. The money paid off Sallie’s medical school loans and enabled us to buy our house on Sullivans Island. My father had not been seen since the day of my mother’s marriage to Reese Newbury, so she deposited the check in a savings account until my father showed up to collect his portion.

  Luke set the check afire before my mother’s eyes, and as she wept he reminded her that he was Luke Wingo, a river boy from Colleton, and she had raised him to understand that a river boy could not be bought at any price.

  In June, the foreman of the project had sent a demolition crew out to Melrose Island to destroy the house where I had grown up. A twelve-man crew, three trucks, and two bulldozers were sent to complete the job. When one of the crew took a crowbar to the front door, a shot was fired from the forest, splintering the wood two inches above his head. Rifle fire began spraying the yard. Three bullets punctured tires on the three trucks and the crew ran down the island road toward town.

  When they were gone, Luke walked out of the forest; and using Molotov cocktails he had hidden in the barn, he blew up the three trucks and the two bulldozers that had been sent by strangers to pull down his house.

  It had begun now in earnest.

  The next day, the crew returned, accompanied by a battalion of National Guardsmen who made a sweep through the woods around the house before signaling that it was all clear for the demolition to commence. From a tree across the river, Luke watched them raze the house where we had grown up. Later, he told me it was like watching his entire family die right before his eyes.

  So, my town became a designated ruin, but unlike the virile and eternal remnants of older civilizations, Colleton was left with no subterranean sign of its former existence. They stripped the earth of even a memory of a town. The site of Colleton was plowed under and white pines were planted under the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture. Each day, six thousand workers with special decals on their cars
and trucks streamed across the bridges that led to the construction sites. By October 1, access to Colleton County was forever closed to any citizen not employed by the Atomic Energy Commission. Aircraft were forbidden by the Civil Aeronautics Board from making flights over the classified areas. Work was progressing rapidly on the four separate construction sites around the county.

  The governor of South Carolina made the announcement that all citizens of Colleton had been successfully relocated in other towns and cities around the state and that the Colleton River Project would be fully operational in three years.

  We, the people of Colleton, left like sheep, docile and banished to unspeakable newly created towns without the dark resonance of memory to sustain us. We walked the Carolina earth without the wisdom and accumulated suffering of our forebears to instruct us in times of danger or folly. Set adrift, we floated into the driftless suburbs at the edge of cities. We left not like a defeated tribe, but like one brushed with the black veils and garments of extinction. Singly and in pairs, we left that archipelago of green islands that had been spared the worst disfigurements and indemnities of our times. As a town, we had made the error of staying small—and there is no more unforgivable crime in America.

  Wordlessly, we did what they commanded us to do. They praised us for our selflessness. They broke us with their generosity. They scattered us and sent us to live among strangers. We crawled across those bridges on our knees, whimpering with gratitude for every crumb of praise they threw in the dirt for us to lap up with our tongues. We were Americans, we were southerners, and, God help us, we were heroically and irrevocably stupid and compliant. The meek may yet inherit the earth, but they will not inherit Colleton.

  Only one of us stayed behind to register a small protest. Luke had sold his shrimp boat to a shrimper from Saint Augustine and began to prepare a base of operations from which he would try to slow the progress of the construction. He planned a small rear-guard action that would prove nettlesome to the Mewshaw Company and its workers. But his dreams of insurrection began to grow after his first triumphs. His missions against the project grew more and more bold. The more he dared, the more he achieved. He fashioned a dangerous equation from his early successes.

  The chief of security discerned during the first month of the construction phase of the project that four tons of dynamite were missing from the main construction site on the western edge of the county. The dynamite, he felt, had been removed slowly, over a long period of time. The automobiles of sixty construction workers had their tires slashed in the dirt parking lot near the main construction site. Ten bulldozers were destroyed by fire in a single night. The trailer of the chief engineer was dynamited. Four guard dogs were shot and killed as they patrolled the perimeter of the construction grounds.

  Someone was in the woods and he was armed and dangerous and the construction workers were getting edgy as they crossed the bridges each morning for work.

  It was during this time that my father made his grand re-entry into one of the obscure harbors of South Carolina. While shrimping in Key West, he was approached by a well-dressed man who wore an Accutron watch and a diamond ring and asked my father if he was interested in making some real money. Three days later, my father was on his way to Jamaica, where he had a rendezvous at a swank bar in Montego Bay with a partner of the man with the diamond. My father did not fail to notice that the second man also wore a diamond the size of a lima bean on his left pinkie. Henry Wingo had been waiting his whole life to meet guys who were rich and tasteless enough to cover their hands with women’s jewels. He never learned their last names; he trusted their sense of style.

  “Class,” my father would say later. “Just pure class.”

  Two Jamaicans loaded my father’s shrimp boat down with fifteen hundred pounds of top-grade marijuana, which my father knew about, and fourteen kilos of pure heroin, which they failed to mention to him. One of the Jamaicans made his living as a busboy in a resort hotel but loaded shipments of marijuana whenever the opportunity arose. The other Jamaican, Victor Paramore, worked as an informant for the U.S. Treasury Department, and he was the first witness called to testify when my father’s case came up on the docket in Charleston. When my father landed at a point between Kiawah and Seabrook islands, most of the narcotics agents in our part of the world arrived for his landing party. It was to prove my father’s last attempt at mastering the nuances of venture capitalism.

  When my father went to court, he offered no defense for himself and did not choose to have a lawyer represent him. What he had done was dead wrong, he told the judge, and he had no excuses for his actions nor would he make any. He deserved full punishment under the law for his crime because it had brought shame on him and his family. He received a ten-year sentence and was fined ten thousand dollars.

  My mother paid the fine with the money she had set aside for my father from the sale of the island. In a space of one year I had faced my brother and my father as prisoners.

  But by the time my father went to prison in Atlanta I had little hope that I would ever see my brother Luke alive again.

  “Think bigger. Think bigger,” Luke would tell himself as he roamed the county by night. He was the last remaining citizen of the town of Colleton, and he promised himself he would give them a run for their money before they caught up with him.

  One thing worked greatly in his favor during the first months of his rebellion. The government was not sure that Luke was the saboteur in the forests. He was the main suspect, of course, but no one had seen him to make a positive identification. Like the Viet Cong he had come to admire so much, Luke owned those long morning hours after midnight when he filled the lives of ill-paid guards with dread. He moved only at night in his displaced country, avoiding the patrol boats in the rivers and the cruising police cars along the abandoned roads. As the weeks passed, a terrible sense of priesthood obsessed him as he walked through the memorized woods of his childhood. He heard voices and began to see the faces of his family materialize in the branches of trees. All the hallucinations—or visions, as he preferred to call them—were brimming with applause and consent for the efficacy of his mission, his sacred walkabout in the war zone where he served as a liberation army of one. It worried him when he began to talk to himself.

  But he was the almsman of a valuable birthright in these first weeks of his war against the state and he was secure in his unconferrable knowledge of all the mysteries of the lowcountry. They were hunting a native son who had appropriated all the secrets the rivers could articulate in a single lifetime. He surveyed the vast estate of that terrain he vowed to keep open. He circumnavigated the entire county by foot and by small sailboat. He noted the flow of traffic in the rivers and across the bridges, and the number of railcars bringing in loads of coal across the two trestles in the north of the county. He established a safe house in Savannah and one in Brunswick, Georgia. After each strike, he would leave Colleton for three weeks until the men who hunted him grew tired of following cold trails. All over the sea islands, in abandoned wells or buried beneath the foundations of houses, he hid contraband, weapons, and food.

  His first acts were simple vandalism, but of a high order. He had developed good habits over the years, and he studied his job and grew more skillful at it. He examined both his mistakes and his small victories, gathering data for future operations, amending his techniques, then perfecting them. The isolation, the self-containment, and the fierce necessity for concentration made him both cautious and formidable. In the deep woods near the great swamps, he hunted the white-tailed deer with a bow and arrow, marveling at his capacity for stillness as he waited in trees above salt licks. He felt green and magic and his heart was glad for trees and deer and islands. He hunted with the astonishment of one who had retreated a thousand years, stepped back into the clean and timeless realms when tribes of Yemassee had stalked deer in the same way. Luke was grateful to the animals who sustained him and he knew why primitive men had worshiped deer as gods and painted
them on the walls of caves as an act of ecstasy and prayer. He had never felt so startlingly alive, so authentic, or so necessary. Always he had visions, but they possessed the supple intensity of dreams. He slept during the day and sang in his sleep. Search planes and helicopters hunted for him as he slept. He dreamed of things dazzling and miraculous and was happy when he awoke to starlight that the dreams did not fade but retained their shape in frescoes inked in light and blood across the sky. He burned with a revolutionary zeal. Ideas rose out of him, streamed through his hair like wildflowers.

  In some ways, he felt as if he was the last sane man in America. He recited the statistics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to himself whenever he felt doubts about his calling. If he could prevent the construction of a thousand nuclear weapons, he could in theory be responsible for saving a hundred million human lives. He began to listen to the passionate counsel of a single voice within him whose tone was urgent and committed. This voice set down laws of behavior, established long-range goals, and initiated guerrilla actions. Luke thought it was his own conscience speaking, and he listened to it in a kind of rapture as he wandered alive and free in a stateless state, discovering with pleasure that an enlightened banditry came easily to him. He stole supplies, an occasional fast boat, rifles, and ammunition. His was an uncompromising advocacy of a beloved, endangered land. It was not his fault if that vision was enlarging to include not only Colleton but all of a wonderful planet.

  Often he would enter into the surreal devastated town of Colleton itself, walking through the expunged streets and naming aloud each family who once lived on each acre of overgrown earth. He drifted through the ruptured wasteland of cemeteries and felt the small wounds in the bulldozed earth where his townsmen had once been interred. He walked down the Street of Tides, forever silenced of commerce or the murmuring of neighbors, forever bereft of the dark, glorious aromas of coffee or the polite skirmishing of traffic. Luke could feel the vital presence of the town beneath him. He felt it straining to rise out of the earth full born, healthy and blooming with the buoyant aura of resurrection. Dreaming again, he thought he could hear the town screaming at him, reciting the long elegies of its aggrievement, singing out an anthem of subversion and loss, demanding restitution, hoarse from reciting the powerful litanies of extinction. In moonlight, he moved toward our grandmother’s house and was furious when he could not find that half-acre of land beside the river. All landmarks had been effaced and not until he found the water oak where he, Savannah, and I had carved our names one Easter Sunday was he certain he had found the right spot. Crabgrass and kudzu were growing in the scarred earth where Tolitha and Amos once lived. He walked back toward the floating dock and tripped on something in the high grass. Reaching back, he knew what it was going to be, and he lifted my grandfather’s cross up on his shoulder and as an act of homage he took that cross back to the Street of Tides and walked the length and breadth of that street in happy remembrance of his grandfather. He felt the weight of that cross cutting into his shoulder, felt the wood printing the truth of its undamaged grain in his flesh, marking him, wounding him, reminding him of the righteousness of his mission.