The Water Is Wide

by Pat Conroy

  My car was parked at the Skimberrys’ house. Ida fixed Jim and me a hot cup of coffee while Zeke told a few Bennington stories. Jim and I departed soon and drove rather quickly over to the marina on Hilton Head where the VISTA workers had promised to meet the boat. As I rounded the curve to the marina, I saw in one swift glance that the boat had landed precisely on schedule, that the children and chaperones were safely grounded, and that no one had been drowned, lost, or fumigated on the way over. I saw in another glance that no VISTA workers were there to meet the boat.

  Mrs. Brown perceptively analyzed the situation by saying, “We don’t have no wheels on our feet, son.”

  I put in a phone call to my dear, steadfast friend, Bernie Schein. In a calm, constrained, rational tone I asked Bernie a single question, “Where the hell are those VISTA workers, you goddam son of a bitch?”

  Bernie, the acknowledged master of all situations, whose coolness and vision under pressure brought him admiration from all quarters, said in a quiet, modulated tone, “Those stupid bastards promised me they’d be there.”

  Somewhere along the Atlantic seaboard, four government cars driven by idealistic young VISTAs stood in formation facing the rising tides and looking for the boat from Yamacraw Island. So in the prodigious planning and mapping out of strategy during the past week, the one breakdown of logistics came in transportation overland.

  Mrs. Brown said, “It don’t look like very much planning went into this trip.”

  I leaped back into the car and drove furiously back to the black high school from whence the rejected driver had come. I arrived at the high school, sprinted into the principal’s office, and demanded to know why a bus was not waiting for the poor children at Yamacraw Island. No less a person than Ezra Bennington himself, the grand patriarch of Bluffton, had requested a bus to meet the boat from Yamacraw. Why, I demanded, was this bus not forthcoming?

  “You sent him back,” the secretary, nonplussed, answered me.

  “A monumental mistake. My fault, of course, but I have got to have that driver.”

  “I will get him for you, sir.”

  The secretary was flashing me one of those looks I sometimes notice I get from strangers. By nature I am high-strung and animated, but when frustration confronts me head on, I degenerate into a demoniac. It is harmless and only a little schizoid, but it often intimidates people.

  When the driver, the beautiful, enchanted prince of a driver, arrived in the principal’s office, I rushed him to his bus and told him to follow me. Once again I was airborne between Bluffton and Hilton Head Island. The driver, whose name was Robert, seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation and headed for the marina as quickly as his regulator would allow.

  At the marina everybody mobbed my car, shouting, chanting, wailing about something that I could not fathom amidst the gibberish. Finally, Joe Sanfort got across to me that Mary had hurt her knee by falling on the asphalt. I got out of the car and ran over to where Mary was sitting.

  “Little skinned knee never hurt anybody, Mary. You just been living on that island where there ain’t no cement,” I said, walking over to her. She was covering her knee with her hand, and dark, red blood oozed between her fingers. I asked her to move her hand so I could see how badly she was hurt. She moved her hand and I was jarred by the sight of Mary’s bloodstained but ivory white kneecap. A flap of skin lay smashed against the right side of her bone.

  “That girl just don’t have any meat on her bones, that’s why the cut looks so bad,” Mrs. Brown intoned. “Lawd, if a high wind come along, we’d have to put rocks in that girl’s pockets to keep her from blowin’ away.”

  I knew that Mary was extremely sensitive about her weight. She had grown tall quickly and her body had not filled out proportionately to her height. Almost as tall as I, she had a beautiful face and one day would be a stunning woman. A shy thirteen, she hated being teased about her weight. She gave Mrs. Brown a look that would have melted a submarine.

  The bus drove up and all the kids and chaperones piled on, the kids wearing their masks and clutching their bags. I gave the driver instructions on how to get to Bernie’s school. Then Mary and I lit out for the doctor’s office. Her knee merited immediate treatment and it took no specialist to realize that her wound would require quite a few stitches. For the sixth time that day, I was thundering down the Bluffton road.

  We headed for Dr. Wohlert’s office. Mary knew and trusted him. He was the only doctor around for thirty miles. He was also the most controversial figure in South Carolina at that time. The previous year, Dr. Wohlert had publicized the fact that many of the lowcountry blacks he treated were worm-ridden and dying of malnutrition. Immediately after this announcement, national magazines came out with stories about intestinal parasites and hunger in Beaufort County. National attention was focused on Beaufort, and her white citizens smouldered in self-righteous fury as more and more statistics were made available, proving the doctor to be correct. He was vilified unmercifully by the local press and residents. I had never met the man, but many of my white friends had pictured him as a malignant tumor, demented, loco, a drug addict, an incompetent, a carpetbagger, an unregenerated liar who should have his gonads cut oft and hung like two trophies in the chamber of commerce building. Therefore, with all of this Anglo-Saxon wrath directed at him from the good solid citizens of the county, who thought blacks and chimpanzees were somehow parallel in evolutionary development, there was an excellent chance that Wohlert was a damn good guy.

  The blacks from Yamacraw loved him. Ted Stone called him “a Communist trained in Havana.” Whatever he was, I found it extraordinary that he could still be functioning in a county that had done so much to torture and discredit him. The community pressure levied against him would have sent me to an asylum. There was, in fact, another rumor that he was bouncing from one crazy house to another.

  Dr. Wohlert’s waiting room was filled not with patients but with unsmiling young men and women who reacted strangely when I broke through the door and asked if Wohlert was in. The men were long-hairs; the women were sallow-faced, with hard eyes and yellowish lips. I realized after a moment that they acted as bodyguards for the doctor; no one passed them without going through a security check.

  “Who are you?” one of the guys asked me.

  “Who are you?” I asked back. “Look, man, I teach on Yamacraw Island and one of my students cracked her knee open. It needs some stitches.”

  A nurse appeared from behind me, a very pleasant woman with an amicable smile.

  “Bring her in. The doctor will see her in a moment.”

  I went to the car and helped Mary into the office. The guards loosened up when they saw Mary’s knee bone sticking out. The nurse led us to a back room, where I sat Mary on a table. I joked with Mary a little bit. She was beginning to worry me, since she had not uttered a single word since her accident.

  “Mary, I have seen many cases like this before when I worked as a doctor’s aide during the Punic Wars.” I stared at her wound with professional detachment.

  “It is my opinion that Doctor Wohlert will have to cut your leg off.”

  Mary looked horror-stricken.

  “It’s a joke, Mary. It’s just a joke,” I quickly amended. Mary, with a majestic silence, let me know that she was not amused.

  Presently Dr. Wohlert entered the room. He moved frenetically, eyes darting and bloodshot, hands quick and nervous, gestures sudden and unplanned. He was a small man with a birdlike fragility about him. His glasses were thick, his hair was disheveled and wildly amassed on a narrow, strikingly intelligent head. His eyes caught me. The toll of martyrdom weighed heavily on him, and the wrath of the citizenry had taken a considerable toll on his physical appearance. Without asking a single question, I could discern that the good doctor had been through hell.

  He shook my hand as if I had handed him a two-week-old herring—no warmth, no firmness, a noncommittal handshake. I could see that he could not make the connection between Mary and me.
As briefly as possible I explained that I was teaching on Yamacraw Island, was in the midst of an abortive field trip, and that Mary’s knee bone had screwed things up by popping out of her knee. Mary, meanwhile, still looked dazed and resigned to a silent, unflinching suffering. When the doctor asked her if she was hurting, she merely nodded her head affirmatively. His office was not a model of order, but he found what he needed, pumped the knee full of Novocain, and began to tie the flesh together.

  When he was almost finished, he asked me a question which I thought strange and troubling. “Have the rednecks tried to get you yet?”

  “Not yet, Doctor.”

  “That’s good. I hope they don’t.”

  I thanked him, helped Mary off the table, and walked out to the lobby, where I asked the nurse to send the bill to the Beaufort County Board of Education. I figured they had more money than Mary’s parents.

  We now traveled the thirty miles from Bluffton to Port Royal in record time. The bus carrying the others had arrived a half-hour before. An air of excitement had descended over the playground beside the school. Each Yamacraw child was surrounded by five smiling, peppy white kids from Bernie’s remarkable school of Port Royal.

  Bernie’s school was entrenched in a white neighborhood pocked with trailer parks and residents who had given George Wallace a heavy chunk of support in the 1968 presidential election, but somehow, he sold the idea of the Yamacraw expedition to the entire community. I think the good people of Port Royal were expecting the Yamacrawans to paddle over in their dug-out canoes, chanting in the unknown tongue to the wind god. Several of the Port Royal sixth graders I talked to that day were disappointed because my students did not wear bones in their noses, or carry spears to drive away enemy warriors that might attack them on their journey back to the island. Yet the year was 1969, and Bernie had mesmerized white parents sufficiently so that they were accepting fifteen black children into their homes.

  Bernie emerged from a cluster of giggling girls when he saw me, raised his cigar in salute, then ran over to my car.

  “You missed it, boy. You missed the greatest welcome since Caesar returned to Rome.”

  “What happened, Bernard?”

  “I was in class, trying to teach, and worrying that your ass would never show up. Then the bus drove up in front of the school. A kid came running into my class and said, ‘They’re here!’ Well, boy, when that kid said that, every goddam kid in this school, every single child in this whole school, ran out of their classrooms, trampled down their teachers, and surrounded the bus, cheering and clapping and raising hell. They were so glad your kids made it. The Yamacraw kids peeked out their windows on the bus, looking like the world had gone crazy. I walked through the crowd, you know how I am, like a god among men, and got on the bus and gave the official welcoming speech. I escorted Mrs. Brown off the bus, then Miss Glover, got my sixth graders to lead the Yamacraw kids off and into the lunchroom. I just want to tell you one thing, son. It was the greatest, the most spontaneous demonstration of excitement I have ever seen.”

  Evidently my students had been completely won over by their peers from Port Royal. I saw Oscar and Big C riding around the basketball court on brand-new bicycles. A couple of the other boys were teaching the mainland kids the island’s perverted version of basketball. The girls were busy decorating the floats that would be used in Bernie’s second annual Halloween parade. A spirit of good-will seemed to reign over the proceedings, a shrill, Fat Tuesday drone of voices and cries of children pierced the air. PTA mothers with soft rumps and good smiles manned carnival booths. Saul came strutting up to me carrying a yo-yo.

  “I pop two b’loons to get it,” he bragged.

  “You couldn’t pop a paper bag, Saul.”

  “Yah! I pop two b’loons with two darts.”

  Lincoln breezed up with a plastic Jesus he had won by knocking milk bottles down with a baseball. Cindy Lou ran up to tell me, “That man Bernie is crazy man. Lawd, he so crazy. He stick his ol’ ugly tongue out at me.”

  “Stick your ol’ ugly tongue back at him.”

  So there was this great carnival. Bernie had drilled his students well. They treated the Yamacraw kids like visiting royalty. I thought later that perhaps Bernie and I had concocted a shallow arena for the betterment of race relations, that what we had done was better for us (some crowning achievement we could point to and say, “Look what we have done for the improvement of mankind”) than for the people of Port Royal or the children of Yamacraw. We wanted to do so much, wanted to be small catalysts in the transformation of the disfigured sacramental body of the South, which had sired us. I was a cynic who needed desperately to believe in the salvation of mankind or at least in the potential salvation. Bernie was an optimist who needed proof that his philosophy of joy and the resurrection of the spirit was not the delusion of a grinning Pollyanna. God, we were concerned about things: war, prejudice, injustice, education. Together we were insufferable, pontifical, self-righteous voices of the Eucharist, pipelines to the Almighty. We could not be wrong, because we were young, humanistic, and full of shit.

  But on this day it seemed that Bernie and I had stumbled on something that transcended our personal preoccupations. Frank, Top Cat, Jasper, Ethel, Richard, Lincoln, Jimmy Sue, and all the rest of the insular, world-protected crowd that came across the river that day were having a ball. I could see it and they told me.

  When I revved up the pickup truck, decorated with red and purple streamers and with a boat hooked onto the back, at the start of the Port Royal Halloween parade, every one of my students clambered all over the truck and boat, faces hidden in soggy masks, bags saturated by the light drizzle that had fallen all day, Top Cat leaning in the window saying hi to Barbara, Mrs. Conrack, the strut of majorettes, the roll of drums, the lines of spectators braving the rain, Jessica sitting in my lap, Oscar blowing his noisemaker constantly, vigorously, and without end. All of it was surrealistic, gray-misted, a spoof of never-never land that had little to do with Yamacraw Island.

  After the parade, I had a brief meeting with the gang, told them to enjoy trick-or-treating, to be kind to their hosts, to remember that I would casually kick the hell out of them if they got scratched, hurt, or injured, and that I would meet them in front of the school the following morning at nine o’clock. I also told them that each one of them would give me exactly half of the candy they collected on Halloween night.

  “No, Conrack. You no get nuttin’,” said Cindy Lou.

  The next morning a straight line of five cars met in front of Port Royal Elementary School. Everyone assembled rather slowly. The weather was not good. To avoid complete hyperbole and to describe with a fair amount of accuracy the kind of weather the gods saw fit to plague the sea islands with on this critical day of November the first, I would have to say that Beaufort was experiencing a mild hurricane. Torrential rains flooded the streets and driving winds swept through trees bent like old men. The weather will clear up, I told everyone.

  When we arrived at the dock at Hilton Head, the weather had gotten worse. I heard Oscar, who was riding with me, lean over to Frank and whisper, “Shee-ut, waves so big!” The boat captain had to be roused from his house, which was near the dock. He started talking about the storm of ’59 and the shrimp boat that had sunk and taken six men with it. Then he mentioned the great storm of ’52, which had splintered ships of iron and littered a fifty-mile stretch of beach with debris. “That’s very nice, Captain, but can you tell me if you can get those kids back to the island safely?”

  “Oh, I s’pose so,” he answered. “Why don’t we wait a little while. I do believe the weather gonna clear. Fact is, I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Great. Captain, I have got to get those kids back to the island or their parents are going to kill me.”

  “It gonna clear up.”

  Two hours later the weather had worsened considerably. Great, high waves smashed over the dock and the whole river was boiling, savage, and unrestrained. Jesus could not ha
ve gotten across that river. Moses couldn’t have opened it up. A miracle could not have calmed those raging waters soon enough to get those kids across the water to their homes.

  I called Bennington, told him the situation, and asked where I could house those kids. I had to fight back an urge to ask him if we could bring the entire group over to snooze in the luxury of his walnut-paneled, many-columned house by the river. He was ingratiating on the phone and said we could sleep on mats in the Hilton Head Elementary School. He would see to it personally. I then called the sheriff and asked him to radio Ted Stone, so he could let the parents know that the children were safe and would be home, hopefully, the following day.

  The gang bedded down in the school. A few noisemakers sounded. Everyone ate a lot of Halloween candy. Mary sat by herself in considerable pain. I vowed to myself that this was the last transriver venture of which I would be a part. And the rain came down.

  All of my doubts about parental retribution for the extra day spent away from the island were dispelled when I walked into school Monday morning. Almost every mouth in the room chomped on pieces of Double Bubble gum, candy corn, or caramel squares. The wet sounds of eating and chewing filled the air.

  “Did you have a good time, Halloween?” I asked.

  “Oh, Gawd. We have so much fun,” Lincoln answered first.

  “That town the nicest place in de world,” Ethel added. “All you do is knock on door and people pop their head out d’ door to give you some sweets.”

  “That is sho’ a fine town,” said Carolina.

  “People so nice. Feed us so good and treat us just fine.”