The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

  “They’re both worried sick about you, Luke,” said Savannah. “They want you to give it up and come back with us.”

  “It was all perfectly clear to me when I started this thing,” he said. “I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought it was the only sane response a person could have. I did what came natural to me. I find it hard to think I acted like a complete asshole. Do you know I have enough stolen dynamite on this island to blow up half of Charleston? But I can’t even get close enough to the building site now to blow up a workman’s lunch pail. They’ve nearly caught me the last three times I tried. I blew up a kennel full of guard dogs a month ago.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “No more Mr. Nice Guy, huh, Luke?”

  “Dogs are a serious threat, Tom,” he said. “They hunt me with dogs.”

  “You’ve got all the environmentalists behind you,” Savannah said. “They don’t approve of your tactics, but they all agreed that your protest was what mobilized them to action.”

  “All the members of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society wear green armbands to their meetings,” I said.

  “La-di-da,” he answered. “I’ve studied this carefully. I know that both of you think I’ve never opened a book in my whole life, but I’ve looked at these issues carefully. Whenever Big Money goes up against the Environment, Big Money always wins. It’s an American law, like the right of free assembly. Someone is going to make millions of dollars manufacturing plutonium in this county and that’s the only fact that makes any difference at all. Someone will make millions of dollars turning that plutonium into nuclear weapons. I can’t tolerate the thought of those weapons, Tom and Savannah. It’s not in me to do it. All the politicians and all the generals and all the soldiers and all the civilians who make the weapons aren’t human beings to me. I don’t care if anybody agrees with me or not. This is the way I’m made up. I’m talking of the only part of me that means anything to me at all. That they would give away Colleton is one thing. I could abide that. I really could. If they were providing six thousand jobs and put people to work growing tomatoes or oysters or gardenias. Hell, I could make that sacrifice. If it was a steel mill or a chemical company, I wouldn’t like it much, but I could adjust. But to desecrate the memory of Colleton for plutonium. I’m sorry. I can’t swing with the program.”

  “Most people think you’re crazy, Luke,” I said. “They think you’re a murderer and that you’re insane.”

  “I have terrible headaches, Tom,” he said. “That’s the only thing wrong with me.”

  “I have migraines too,” I said. “But I haven’t killed four people.”

  “That wasn’t my plan,” he said. “That train was not scheduled.”

  “You’re still wanted for murder,” I said.

  “They build hydrogen bombs and call me a murderer,” he said, taking a long pull on the bourbon. “The world is fucked, Tom and Savannah.”

  “It’s not your job to stop the world from building hydrogen bombs,” Savannah said.

  “Then whose job is it, Savannah?” he asked.

  “Your whole outlook is too simple,” I said.

  “Teach me how to be complex,” he answered. “What I’m doing makes very little sense to me, Tom. But what you and everyone else are doing makes no sense at all.”

  “Where did this amazing moral sensitivity come from?” I asked. “Why wasn’t it in operation during the Vietnam War when you merrily went on search-and-destroy missions and got pissed off at Savannah and me for marching in antiwar demonstrations?”

  “They told us we were fighting so the Vietnamese could be free. That seemed like a fine idea to me. I didn’t see one thing wrong with it. I didn’t know I was fighting so they could steal my house when I got back.”

  “Why didn’t you just protest nonviolently against the building of the Colleton River Project?” Savannah asked.

  “I thought this would be more likely to get their attention, Savannah,” he said. “I thought it would be more effective. I also thought I was good enough to run the sons of bitches clean out of the county. I underestimated them and overestimated myself. I haven’t done shit to even slow them up.”

  “Knocking out those bridges slowed the hell out of them,” I said. “I promise you that much, son. You re-routed a bunch of trucks in your career.”

  “But you don’t understand,” he said. “I thought I could shut the whole operation down.”

  “How?” Savannah asked.

  “Because I could see it,” he answered. “I could actually visualize the whole thing. In my whole life if I could see something in my own mind, I could make it happen. Before we went to get the white porpoise, I had made that trip a hundred times in my mind. When we were down there in Miami, there wasn’t one thing that happened that surprised me.”

  “The whole thing surprised me,” Savannah said. “I couldn’t believe it was me coming up the coastal highway lying on top of a porpoise.”

  “I thought I could make the construction workers so afraid of me that they wouldn’t set foot in Colleton,” Luke said.

  “You did, Luke,” I said. “They’re terrified of you but they’ve got families to feed.”

  “It all makes more sense when I’m out here alone,” he smiled. “I can talk myself into anything. Do y’all remember when Mama read us The Diary of Anne Frank when we were kids?”

  “She should never have read us that book,” I said. “Savannah had nightmares about Nazis breaking down the door for years.”

  “Do you remember when Savannah made us go see Mrs. Regenstein after we read that book?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember that at all, Luke,” said Savannah.

  “Neither do I,” I said. “We were little kids when Mom read us that book.”

  “Mrs. Regenstein was a refugee from Germany living with Aaron Greenberg and his family. She’d lost her whole family in a concentration camp.”

  “She showed us her tattoo,” I said, remembering.

  “Not a tattoo, Tom,” Luke said. “She showed us the number they put on her forearm at the concentration camp.”

  “What’s the point of the story, Luke?” I asked.

  “No point,” he said. “It was the first time I realized about Savannah’s greatness.”

  “Do tell me all about it, Luke,” Savannah said, hugging him. “I love stories where I’m a figure of grandeur.”

  “Do you stock vomit bags in your rebel camp?” I asked.

  “After Mama read about Anne Frank, Savannah spent three days fixing up a hiding place in the barn. She put up food and water and everything. She even fixed up this little bulletin board, so some other kid could paste up pictures out of magazines like Anne Frank did.”

  “How ridiculous,” I said.

  “Yes,” Luke agreed. “But it was a gesture, Tom. It was something. Most of Europe did nothing when they heard about the Jews. We had a sister who was eight years old who fixed up a place in our barn in case it happened again. But that isn’t the story I remembered the most.”

  “I’m sure I did something outrageously heroic,” Savannah said, enjoying herself.

  “No, you did something nice,” he said. “You made Tom and me go with you when you went to visit Mrs. Regenstein. She always scared me because she spoke English with such a thick accent and I didn’t want to go. But you made us both go, Savannah. Tom and I were standing behind you when Mrs. Regenstein answered the door. She said, ‘Guten Morgen, Kinder,’ when she saw us. Her glasses were thick and she was very thin. Do you remember what you said to her that day, Savannah?”

  “I don’t even remember that day, Luke,” Savannah said.

  “You said, ‘We’ll hide you,’ ” he said. “You said, ‘You’ll never have to worry about the Nazis coming to Colleton, Mrs. Regenstein, because my brothers and I are here and we’ll hide you. We’ve fixed up a nice place in the barn and we’ll bring you food and magazines.’ ”

  “What did Mrs. Regenstein do that day, Luke?” Savannah asked.

/>   “She fell apart, Savannah,” Luke said. “She cried like I’ve never seen a woman cry before. You thought you had done something terribly wrong and you started to apologize. Mrs. Goldberg came to the door and calmed Mrs. Regenstein down. Mrs. Goldberg gave us some milk and cookies before we left. Mrs. Goldberg loved our butts after that day.”

  “I knew I was a wonderful kid,” Savannah said. “Thanks for telling that story, Luke.”

  “I can tell you thirty more where you were a perfect shit, Savannah,” I said.

  “Who invited him to this island?” Savannah asked, pointing to me.

  “It sure wasn’t me,” Luke said.

  “We came with a proposition, Luke,” I said. “The forces of evil are willing to make a deal.”

  “Don’t tell me,” he said sadly. “If I come to the peace table, they’ll let me keep the whole state of South Carolina.”

  “I don’t think we’re very far apart,” I said. “They sent a guy named Covington.”

  For two days in a world refreshed with the presence of Luke, a secret world lacquered with an argentine shine to the fragrant, palm-scented mornings, we let Luke tell the story of his modest rebellion against his country. A sense of injustice had brought him armed and vengeful to roam his purloined homeland. His failure to change a single thing had transformed his engagement into an addiction. Because he had failed so nakedly, he could not withdraw from his own call to arms. He had become the first victim of his own unappeasable bravado. At first, he thought he had returned to Colleton because he was the only man of principle our town had produced. But in the long solitude of his private struggle he had come to realize that his own contentious vanity had made a defiant affair of honor out of a simple political decision. He did not know how to disengage from the struggle and there were times when he still felt he was doing the only thing a man of his instincts could be expected to do. Luke did not feel that he had been wrong; he felt only that he had acted alone and that was his most grievous crime.

  His voice was like a page of music as he told his story. He told of his slow wanderings through the razed county, his encounters with armed guards, his disappearances to his two safe houses in Georgia after a successful raid, his patient theft of dynamite from the construction site, and the dangers he faced every time he took a boat out on the river. From the Viet Cong he had learned to reach an accordance with darkness and the efficacy of patience in dealing with a numerically superior enemy. He recounted his long surveillance of the four bridges he had taken out on the northern frontier of the county. He could not believe how poorly guarded those bridges were or how easy it was to set powerful time bombs to go off simultaneously at two a.m. and still be back at Marsh Hen Island before the sun rose. He had improved security on the bridges leading to the county immeasurably, he told us, but the death of the men on the train had changed the nature of his protest. Once he had drawn first blood, his war against the property of the state lost all its moral resonance. If he had to kill, then he wished he had not wasted the killings.

  “I should’ve shot the three chief engineers from the Mewshaw Company who are directing the project. I watched each one of them through cross hairs and I thought about putting them down. Then I would think about all their wives and children feeling like shit when they heard that Daddy got a bullet through his eye and I just set the rifle down. I found myself running the stupidest, shittiest guerrilla war I ever heard tell of. I can’t even get the indigenous population to support me because there ain’t no indigenous population. They’ve got scars in the earth where houses used to be. So I blew up a few tractors and trucks and I scared the living hell out of a few Pinkerton guards. My one victory, if you can call it that, is that they haven’t caught me yet. But Lord, brother and sister, they sure have tried like hell.”

  He did not feel defeated, only stalemated. The metaphors that had sustained him in the early days of his dispute had lost their freshness and potency. In solitude, he had discovered he brought no philosophical bedrock to dissent. He had brought passion to the islands but no consistent system of belief. His thoughts were conflicting, romantic, querulous, and intemperate. He could not force his century to make sense and he could find no place for himself within it. He had tried to conduct himself as an honorable man, a man who could not be bought or sold, and woke up one morning to find himself a man with a price on his head. In his deepest self, he did not understand why every American did not join him on the islands when they heard about the nature of his disenchantment with the government. He thought he understood the American soul and learned that he could not even sound the depths of his own. He had never known that the selling of one’s own land and birthright for money was the sport of kings in America. Our parents had raised us to believe that southerners held the land in highest esteem. It was the land and our veneration of the land that made us distinct, and defined our fabulous separateness from other Americans. Luke had made one mistake, he thought. He had believed in the sublimity of the southern way; he hadn’t just mouthed the words.

  “When I first came out here I thought of myself as the last southerner,” he said. “But lately I’ve just thought of myself as the last southern asshole.”

  “We’ve got a gene pool like Loch Ness, Luke,” said Savannah. “We’re all gonna have monsters rising to the surface before it’s over.”

  “If you no longer believe in what you’re doing,” I asked, “then why in the hell are you still out here playing war games?”

  “Because no matter how wrong I am, Tom,” he said, “I’m not quite as wrong as they are. And my being out here reminds them that the stealing of a town can prove hazardous to your health. I’ve even thought about an attack on the construction camp in broad daylight. I’d kill the armed guards first, then I’d try to put down twenty or thirty of the construction workers. I know how to fight a war like this. I just don’t have the heart to fight it like it’s supposed to be fought.”

  “They’d have landed the Marines if you killed that many people,” I said.

  “Acting alone, I lack the courage to kill innocent people,” he said. “I could only kill the innocent in Vietnam when I had the strongest country in the world backing me up. I realized early that unless you’re willing to kill the innocent, you can’t win. You can’t even be. noticed.”

  “You never were very good at compromise, Luke,” I said.

  “Compromise!” he said. “Where was the goddamn compromise? They didn’t tell us that they would build the plant at one end of the county and we could continue to live where we’d lived our whole lives. They said, ‘Leave, fuckers, leave!’ And I understood why they had to do that, Tom. If they ever have an accident in that plant, then everything downstream, every shrimp, octopus, and horseshoe crab, is going to glow in the dark for two hundred years. They mess up one time and they could kill every form of sea life within a fifty-mile radius. They could make a desert out of this entire salt marsh.”

  “When did you become a radical?” Savannah asked. “Was it Vietnam?”

  “I’m not a goddamn radical, Savannah,” he said with fierce conviction. “I hate radicals of every kind whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives. I don’t give a damn about politics and I hate politicians and demonstrators in any form.”

  “Wrong, Luke, honey,” said Savannah. “You’re the best demonstrator I’ve ever seen.”

  He spoke of his frequent returns to Melrose Island when he would wander through the overgrown yard where our house and barn used to be. One night he had slept on the spot where our bedroom had been. He had taken honey from abandoned hives that the wrecking crews had left behind when they destroyed the house. In our mother’s garden, he had picked azaleas and roses and dahlias and placed them on the tiger’s unmarked grave. On the south side of the island he killed with his bow and arrow a wild boar rooting for pecans.

  On the second night, he told of his return to the site of the town and his extraordinary vision of the town rising miraculously out of the earth. Wi
th fear and wonder, he told of the increasing frequency of the monologues he conducted with himself These meditations of solitude frightened him, yet they endowed him with a renewed sense of purpose and clarity. He recalled his difficulty in finding the location of our grandparents’ homesite and tripping over Amos’s cross in the darkness and bearing it down the Street of Tides beneath the strange light of a penumbrous moon. Then he called for all the stores in the town to arise and saw their struggle to be reborn before his eyes. The town had risen in the fury of extinction and he had seen it with his own eyes. Then he had turned and seen Mr. Fruit coming down the street toward him, wild and outcast, still performing his exotic lunatic dance on the street corner where he had spent his entire life. Mr. Fruit was blowing his whistle and directing phantom traffic in the wordless simplicity and grandeur of his art. But when Mr. Fruit materialized, the resurrected town vanished into an altered mirage of nightmare and dust.

  “The town was there for a moment,” Luke said in awe. “I don’t know how to explain it. For a moment I could smell fresh paint and coffee and heard the voices of shopkeepers and the sound of their brooms against the sidewalks. It was all so beautiful and real.”

  Savannah took Luke’s hand and kissed it softly, then said, “You don’t have to explain it to me, Luke. I’ve been seeing things like that my whole life.”

  “But I’m not crazy,” Luke protested. “This was all right there in front of me. I saw the stores. There were sale signs in the window. I could even hear the macaw say ‘good morning’ in the shoe shop. The traffic lights were all working. You’ve got to believe me. This wasn’t a dream.”

  “I know it wasn’t a dream,” Savannah said. “It was just a nice little hallucination. I’m the Queen of Hallucinations. I can tell you all about them.”