It would be my and Pat’s first real Christmas together. I’d been on Fripp during the holidays the year before but had been in the process of moving in and barely remembered it. The few belongings I brought to my new life fit easily into the back of a small truck, which my son drove for several hours to my new address. No sooner had he unloaded than he had to get back to his family in time for Santa Claus. Pat and I put up a tree, exchanged gifts (a nice pen for him, heart-shaped locket for me), then fixed ourselves a simple dinner of roast chicken. And that was the extent of it.
Our newly married Christmas would be memorable, I decided, then set out to make it so. Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. Pat claimed not to care one way or the other, but I was convinced I could change his mind.
I’d fallen in love with my new locale and wanted to embrace everything about life in the Lowcountry, so I went into a frenzy of preparation. Instead of the holly, cedar, and magnolia I normally decorated with, I brought in seashells, seagrass, and palmetto leaves. At an art show, I discovered the clever artisans who made creches from oyster shells as well as reindeer from palm fronds, which added local color to my decor. I made Pat help me loop ribbon around starfish to hang on our tree. It was the most fun I’d ever had decorating.
Getting in the spirit, I declared that our family dinner this year would be a Lowcountry Boil. It was a dish that I didn’t especially like, but I kept that to myself. And although Christmas on the beach felt all wrong (it wasn’t even cold!), I planned a Christmas Eve walk at sunset hand in hand with my sweet new husband. After a lovely candlelit supper, we’d go into town for midnight mass. It would be a special ending to a special day, I told myself cheerily. If you have to break eggs to make an omelet, to make a new life you had to break old traditions and make some new ones.
Then something unexpected happened that left me bewildered and despondent. When Christmas Eve came, my excitement flickered and died out like the proverbial candle in a gust of wind. My spirits sank, and I felt the unmistakable return of the depression I’d battled so much of my life. It wasn’t a full-blown return, just enough to make me mopey. If I didn’t know better—if it weren’t so ridiculous as to be laughable—I’d swear I was homesick. It was laughable, actually. I hadn’t had a joy-filled Christmas since childhood; how could I possibly be homesick for something so long gone? My ex-husband had scorned the secular part of Christmas and found my joy in the season both childlike and irksome. Not only that, he declared it was downright sinful to spend money on gifts and I should be ashamed of myself. Every Christmas morning I’d expected to find coal and ashes in my stocking, the gift Santa brought naughty children.
The sunset walk would make everything right again, I decided, and forced myself to go about my merry way wrapping gifts and preparing for the holiday feast Pat and I were hosting for family and friends the following day. When the time came, I bounced into the den where Pat sat engrossed in a bowl game on TV. I loved football, but it was Christmas. I clapped my hands like a camp counselor and told him it was time for our walk. Pat wasn’t having it. His eyes never leaving the screen, he waved me off. “But you’ll miss the sunset,” I wailed. He answered with a shrug, not even turning his head my way. “There’ll be another sunset. Enjoy your walk.”
So much for a romantic stroll our first Christmas Eve as a married couple, I thought in a huff as I slammed the door behind me. On the beach, the salt air was sharp and crisp, but I barely noticed. There wasn’t a soul in sight, and the deserted beach appeared forlorn and sad, like I felt. Even worse, the sun had disappeared into the ocean and left behind nothing but a rosy glow on the horizon. My bad timing was all Pat’s fault, I thought as my mood soured even more. If he’d come along as I’d planned, all would be well. The sun would be hanging low on the horizon where it belonged, and we’d watch it sink into the Atlantic as we huddled together, our faces bright with happiness and love.
Muttering to myself, I trudged over wet, gray sand until I’d had enough. To add insult to injury, it was low tide, my least favorite time at the ocean. Everything had become a letdown on a day I’d planned with such hope and anticipation. Might as well go back and watch the game since my special Christmas Eve was ruined anyway. Hell, we’d just eat our dinner on TV trays instead of at the beautiful table I’d set! That was the thing about expectations. They always fall short.
Just as I was turning around, something in the water caught my eye. I stopped and blinked. Ever since I’d moved to Fripp I’d heard about the sandbar but hadn’t seen it before. It was only visible during certain conditions of tide and current. And there it was, a narrow strip of white sand stretched like a long pointing finger into the deep dark ocean. Islanders were always warning strollers away from it, since sudden shifts in tides created a real danger. Walking on the sandbar wasn’t worth the risk, folks were told; there was nothing to see except a bare strip of sand.
By the time I reached it, the sandbar stood out even more starkly against the gray waters sloshing around it. Then everything changed: the shocking-pink glow of the western sky suddenly deepened in color and spread out like a huge fan across the horizon. Without a thought of danger I hurried down the sandbar for a closer look, and my mood lifted. It was the blessing I’d come for, and I admonished myself for being so down in the mouth that I’d almost missed out. I stood at the tip of the sandbar for several minutes and stared in wonder and gratitude. The horizon, where vast water met vast sky, was the deep glorious pink of a Christmas rose.
After the glow faded and the sky began to darken, I turned to go and found my feet bogged down in wet sand. The tide was coming in, and I was a good distance from the shore. Already the sandbar had become an island enclosed in surging waters. It was then that I spotted what I’d failed to see in my rush to view the lingering sunset—the soggy finger where I stood was literally covered in sand dollars as far as the eye could see. With a gasp, I knelt down for a closer look. On previous walks, I’d seen the imprint of sand dollars left in wet sand by receding waves, or found brittle brown fragments on the shore. But I’d never seen them alive. Before I walked on it, the sandbar had been the bottom of the ocean; now at low tide, its sea-dwelling creatures had revealed themselves to me. Rather than the dazzling white disks that beachcombers collected, these sand dollars were dark little sea urchins, aflutter with life.
I made my way back to shore on tiptoe by maneuvering carefully to avoid stepping on the small creatures, a virtually impossible task since the sandbar was literally covered with them. My shoes filled with seawater when I crossed the tidal pool to safety, and they made a sloshing sound as I ran home. Ordinarily, running in soggy shoes would’ve slowed me down, but this time I ignored the discomfort. Seeing the sand dollars had made me forget my displeasure with Pat, and I burst in on the last quarter of his game.
“Patrick—you’ve got to see what I found on the sandbar,” I said, gasping for breath. His alarm that I’d gone where angels fear to tread gave way to avid curiosity, which was one of the things I loved most about him. This time he came with me without a word of protest.
In the short time I’d been gone, the tide had changed. I discarded my wet shoes and waded ankle-deep into the icy, incoming waves in bewilderment. “It was right here, I swear it was!” I cried. I kept searching as darkness descended, so sure was I that the sandbar would be visible even under water. Pat waited with surprising patience but he finally reached for my arm to pull me back to shore.
“Come on, sweetheart. Whatever you saw is gone. The tide got it.”
I hugged myself against the salt-laden breeze and leaned into him. “Sand dollars,” I told him. “So many sand dollars. I’ve never seen anything like it. I wanted you to see them.”
“I wish I had,” he said, and I knew he meant it. He would’ve loved it as much as I had. “I should’ve come with you.”
It was the perfect opportunity for wifely rectitude, a self-righteous reminder of my virtues and his failings. But instead I encircled him in a hug, lov
ing him again, and said, “Let’s go home. It’s turning cold.”
After our lovely candlelit dinner (at the table, not on TV trays), Pat surprised me by insisting I open the gift he’d gotten me, even though we’d planned to wait until the following day when family came for the exchange of presents. “You’ll see why,” he told me, and opening the box, I did. Pearl earrings to match the lovely pearls he’d given me before. “Another gift from the sea,” he said. His note read, I find the loving of you the easiest part, the nicest part, the best thing, the very best I’ve ever done for myself. Merry Christmas, darling.
I showed off my pearls the next day, and I would wear them many times in the years that followed. But I never did so without remembering our first real Christmas together, and the unexpected blessings of a Christmas Eve on a sandbar, where I knelt to marvel at the wonder of sea creatures. It’s a blessing I’ll carry with me always.
Chapter 9
From One Storyteller to Another
In the years that Pat and I were together following our wedding day (whenever that was), I never knew Pat to let facts stand in the way of a good story. His stories were always basically true, just embellished by the master raconteur. He’d doctor them up a bit each time depending on the reaction he got from the listener. If a different twist made the story better, or got more laughs, he wasn’t beyond using it. No one relished a good story as much as Pat did.
It was something he had in common with my father. Daddy could tell a story, and he and Pat hit it off right away. I had a feeling they would. In his own way, my father was as much a character as Pat was. For one thing, Daddy was a hoot without meaning to be. As country folks put it, Elton King was a cutup, a sport, and a real card. His humor was broad; Pat’s was more subtle. Daddy made exaggerated faces and gestures when telling a story, slapping his knees and holding his sides with laughter.
While it pleased and egged Pat on when others showed appreciation of his witty banter, Daddy was more apt to squawk “What’s so damn funny?” when you laughed at something he said. Sometimes we couldn’t help ourselves, even when it was caused by his deafness. One time my sisters and I found an old western playing on TV and urged Daddy to come watch with us. He ignored us and we called out, “Aw, c’mon, Daddy—you’ll like it. Lee Marvin in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Daddy appeared at the door scowling. “The man who shot the Liberty Bell? Who the hell wants to see that?”
Daddy also had the best sayings I’ve ever heard, many original with him. He’d never fly on a plane, he told us, because he didn’t want to be higher than a tractor seat or lower than digging potatoes. He claimed one of our local politicians was so crooked they’d had to screw him into the ground to bury him. Some of his sayings I’ve used for local color in my fiction, even though they’re based on unfortunate physical defects. In my first novel I described one of the characters as being so cross-eyed he could stand in the middle of the week and see both Sundays.
The grandkids would persuade Granddaddy King to tell them tales of the good old days, when he grew up during the Depression and survived hard times. The best stories came from him and his brother, my uncle Rex. Both of them told ghost stories that scared the holy hell out of my sisters and me when we were little. We shivered in delicious terror to hear about the Wampus Kitty that lived in the swampland near our house. Her terrible cry was like the scream of a woman. Both Daddy and Uncle Rex swore that they’d been chased by Old Bloody Bones one dark night when they were walking home from Aunt Fenny-Rump’s. Aunt Fenny-Rump was an African American medicine woman who lived in a cabin in the woods, and they’d been sent to fetch one of her remedies. She warned the boys about Old Bloody Bones, a haunt who was wrapped in bloody rags and had a voracious appetite for children, but they didn’t believe her until he came after them.
After I took Pat to meet Daddy and my sisters, Pat never let me hear the end of it. “I can’t believe you, Helen Keller,” he’d say a million times. (Pat was bad about repeating himself.) “You’re sitting on a gold mine with that family of yours. Talk about local color! Your father’s a character and your sisters right out of Steel Magnolias. If you don’t write about them, I will.” When he said that to my sisters, Beckie and Nancy Jane, they both swore he’d better think twice about it. “You married Tanna, Pat Conroy,” Nancy Jane told him, “so you oughta know better than to mess with Alabama girls.”
By then, Pat was learning a lot more about a certain kind of southern women than he’d bargained for. He claimed to be both intrigued and astonished by my sisters and me and what he called our kiss-my-ass sassiness, especially when one of us tangled with our stubborn old daddy, which usually ended in a shouting match. Daddy could embarrass you to death. Taking him to the doctor’s office was an ordeal; if the doctor was running late, Daddy would bang his cane on the receptionist’s window and demand to be seen. Poor Beckie, who lived on the farm next door, usually ended up being the one who had to deal with him. They’d return from an outing with Beckie telling Daddy that next time he needed to go to the doctor, he could, by God, drive himself.
“Those King sisters are spitfires,” Pat told Beckie’s husband, Reggie. “They make you walk the line, don’t they?”
Reggie was quick to agree, then lowered his voice to say, “You damn straight, Pat. The truth is, you got the pick of the litter with Tanna.”
Beckie came storming in from the kitchen waving a broom. “Reggie Schuler! You want me to knock you cross-eyed?” Reggie dodged the broom she tried to clobber him with while Pat eyed me nervously. Since both of his previous marriages had been to Yankee women, he had no way of knowing what he’d gotten himself into. But he was a fast learner.
A couple of times I heard Pat telling folks that he didn’t meet my family until after we married, which is pure bull hockey. He also said that I’d told him I’d never met a Roman Catholic until I met him, but I ordered him to get his story straight. I was born and raised in the country, not on the moon. What I’d actually told him was, I’d never really known any Catholics growing up. In the sticks when I came along, everybody was either Methodist, Baptist, or Pentecostal. And in those days it was more of a class thing than a religious preference, with Methodists believing themselves higher in the social order than Baptists, and Baptists considering themselves above the Holy Rollers.
Because it always got a laugh, Pat was also fond of saying that the first time he met my family, he felt like he was on the set of Deliverance. While it made a better story, it was hardly true. The Kings of Pinckard, Alabama, were not only solidly middle class, we were also highfalutin Methodists. I can tell you one thing, those were not Methodist boys in that movie.
That’s the Kings, however. My mother’s family from Florida were as cracker as they come and ranged from Bible-thumpers to bootleggers. (Let it be known, I refrain from using the term cracker around my relations even though a historian corrected me for calling it a slur. According to him, it’s a perfectly acceptable way of referring to Florida’s rough-and-tumble early settlers. Maybe so, but I’m not taking any chances by riling one up.)
One time before Pat and I married we were taking a trip south, seems like to Mobile, when we stopped by to visit Daddy. To my chagrin, we landed right in the middle of a family reunion of my mother’s relatives. I’d forgotten that they gathered annually for a fish fry after spending the day catching fish in Daddy’s ponds. When we pulled into the yard full of pickups with bumper stickers that read “Go Seminoles” and “Get ’Em Gators,” I knew we were in for it.
Nothing to be done but plunge in. I’d already caused a family scandal by divorcing a holy man; surely it couldn’t get much worse. Taking Pat’s hand, I took him around and introduced him as my fiancé. One of my elderly aunts reared back and looked down her nose to say, “Oh, I know who he is.” Grabbing my arm, she pulled me aside to hiss, “I’m glad your poor mother is dead and gone, or she’d be turning over in her grave.”
Before I could figure that one out, my sister Beckie grabbed my ot
her arm and whispered, “I haven’t had a chance to warn you. Daddy told them you’ve moved to South Carolina with a man.”
“Oh Lord,” I whispered back. “So that’s why they’re upset. I’m living in sin.”
“Even worse,” Beckie told me. “One of them looked Pat up and found out he’s Catholic.”
Definitely worse. Before I could decide the fastest way to exit, an uncle approached me waving my book. “Where’d you learn all them dirty words, girl? It sure wasn’t from your sainted mama.”
Pray God they never read one of Pat’s books, I thought, hurrying toward the house and pulling Pat along with me. I was hoping Uncle Charles was there, the real character of the family, because I knew Pat’d get a kick out of him. My daddy loved to tell about the time Uncle Charles left the family reunion to run down to Dothan (ten miles away) to get more oysters for the picnic. No one knew where on earth he went because he never reappeared. Uncle Charles was a favorite with the kids because he carried around a myna bird who could sing all the verses of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
I adored Uncle Charles too; he played a mean harmonica, yodeled as well as Hank Senior, and buck-danced like nobody’s business. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen him sober. As a girl, I’d idolized his wife, Annie Mae, an Ava Gardner look-alike and Miss Florida finalist. I loved to stay with them in Pensacola because Annie Mae read movie magazines to me, which my mother considered trashy and didn’t allow me and my sisters to look at. During one of my visits, Uncle Charles said something that Annie Mae found a tad peculiar. After he turned away, she looked at me and pointed to her temple. “You know Charles, he ain’t right,” she said sotto voce. It would become a favorite buzzword of me and my sisters; whenever someone appeared a bit off, one or the other of us would whisper, “You know he ain’t right.”
Tell Me a Story Page 15
