Read The Water Is Wide Page 8


  Yet his life was fascinating to me, in that it was so different from my own. My father taught me how to shoot a hook shot, lead a fast break, and feed off to the open man; he also instructed me how to throw a cross-body block and how to field a ground ball skimming across a short-grassed infield. To my father life offered no finer pleasures or more consummate skills. Mr. Stone, in contrast, could skin and clean a deer in an hour, take apart a boat motor and assemble it again, milk a cow, plant a garden, fix a muffler, and drag a seine across a shallow inlet in preparation for a shrimp dinner. My life was centered around academics and sports; Stone’s was concerned with the arts of survival. I depended on supermarkets and theaters; Stone frequented feed stores and garden-supply shops when he journeyed to Savannah.

  So I listened to Stone and was glad to be learning. He loved to talk about himself and nothing could have been more instructive to me. On a whim, he had once traveled to Florida with a group of friends, bought the boat which Humphrey Bogart captained in the film The African Queen, and brought it back to Yamacraw Island, where it survived a year then rotted slowly into oblivion. It gave me an immense thrill to think that my boat docked in the same spot which once harbored the African Queen. It fired the Irish romanticism within me, as did Mr. Stone’s accounts of the hurricane of ’59 that crushed boats and docks like playthings, that uprooted oak trees as tall as towers, that incapacitated a town thirty miles from the island and made it a national disaster area. As his house creaked ominously, Ted and Lou sipped coffee and watched the gods of storm seize the wind and river for several violent hours.

  Stone’s powers of description were excellent. He spent two hours one day relating his war experiences. He had landed on the third wave during D-Day, fought his way across France, teamed up with a sharp-shooting Texan, who together with Stone formed a murderously competent sniping team, and eventually crossed into Germany when the armistice was signed. With eyes blue and shimmering, yet serious and fatalistic, he described a German soldier’s head rising above a roof-top ledge, how he waited until he could see the German’s whole head, until he could see the face was young and unlined. He aimed carefully and put a bullet between the eyes of his enemy. It was a strange story, strangely told, and Ted Stone grew uncharacteristically reflective and philosophical as he thought of the life he snuffed out somewhere in France twenty-five years before. “Killing a man is different from killing a deer.” Yet he was intensely proud that he had killed other men in the defense of his country.

  A faded American flag flew from a wooden pole in the backyard of the Stone house. This was the symbol of the post office, yet also seemed to symbolize Stone’s allegiance to his country which was blind, uncompromising, unconditional, and though he would have fought me had he heard me express the thought, almost Third Reich in its fervor and rigidity.

  One night at the Stones’ is memorable. It was October 15, Moratorium Day, when the United States reverberated with the chants and pleadings of those discontented with the war. I wanted desperately to watch the news that night, to see how the Washington march went, and to see the reaction of people around the country to the moratorium itself. I had a pretty good idea about what Ted thought about the moratorium, but I did not realize that I would be watching the greatest show on earth in Ted’s living room. As soon as the news came on, Ted began a long monologue which continued unabated till I excused myself an hour later.

  “Look at those long-haired bastards. Can’t tell if they’re boys or girls. Worse than Germans or Japs. Look at that hippie with the flag sewed to his butt. I’d cut it off his ass with a butcher knife if I was there. Take half of his ass with it. Lice. All they are is lice. Huntley and Brinkley are lice, too. They aren’t supporting our boys in Vietnam. Naw. They’re lice. Just like that nigger Martin Luther King. He was a goddam Communist sure as hell. Ask J. Edgar Hoover. Now there’s a man. Finest man in America. He calls a spade a spade. Look at them lice there now. Cute, ain’t they? I wouldn’t give them a drink of piss if they were dyin’ of thirst. There are some niggers. Every time you turn on TV you see the niggers. They even got them brushin’ their teeth on TV. Hippies. Goddam Communist hippies. Dirty, don’t take baths. We got some hippies coming to this island now. Those California boys are just hippies that get their hair cut before they come here. All of ’em’s lice. Nigger-lovin’ lice. There’s the White House. Where the President of the United States lives. Where the President of the United States of America leads his people. Wallace wouldn’t have had it. There would have been bodies lyin’ all over the streets if he had gotten in. He’d of used flame throwers and tanks.”

  Stone talked and I listened. It was insane, ludicrous, and frightening. His face curled in hatred. He forgot I was in the room. He smelled blood and his whole personality was transfixed to the thought that the marchers should die en masse on Constitution Avenue. He wanted them dead, he said, “to give America a good name in the free world.” D. P. Conroy said nothing. Stricken with fright, I saw the awesome display of weapons mounted in Stone’s front room and did not wish to give Stone even the slightest reason to identify me with the Washington marchers. When I left, Stone told me to come watch the news with him anytime.

  The next day I was swimming off Stone’s dock after school. The water was growing colder, but its bracing chill seemed to clean out the frustrations for a little while. Stone came down to the dock and started talking. This time he talked of fishing.

  “Good fishing off this dock here,” he said. “Catch a whole string of winter trout, right now. Might even catch a sea trout or two. My son caught a ten-foot shark off this dock a year ago.”

  In three strokes I covered about twenty yards of water. In a flash of spray and spume and chilled blood, I stood upon the dock a scant four seconds after Stone delivered the news about the shark.

  “Are there lots of sharks out there?” I asked, my voice squeaking and my knees filled with jelly.

  “Oh, lots of them. They hang around the dock a lot.”

  “That’s great, Mr. Stone. That is really great. You mean I have been swimming in shark-infested waters all this time and you never told me!”

  “You knew sharks lived in salt water.”

  “I did not know they had a clubhouse under your dock, or my young ass would never have hit water. Sharks eat people, Mr. Stone.”

  “Not around here. I’ve never heard of anyone getting eaten around here.”

  “Well, I sure don’t want to become a precedent.” My afternoon swims ended for all time on that day.

  Several friends of mine in Beaufort warned me about forming any kind of relationship with Zeke Skimberry. Skimberry was the maintenance man of the Bluffton district and because of a decree emanating from the high echelons of the educational hierarchy, Zeke was designated as the official guardian of my boat. Skimberry aroused suspicion in many quarters because of his sycophantic allegiance to Ezra Bennington. Zeke had survived many purges of personnel and many tumultuous years in the Bluffton school system by affixing his fate to the more luminous and permanent star of Bennington. He mowed Bennington’s grass, moved cumbersome early American furniture around Mrs. Bennington’s plush antique shop, and acted as Bennington’s chauffeur, valet, and servant when the occasion demanded it. Behind his back, people hissed that Zeke was “Bennington’s nigger” and nothing more. I found a lot more.

  He was, on first meeting, one of the warmest, most genuinely friendly people I had ever met. His large blue eyes danced and flashed expressively, puckishly; a grin constantly played about his mouth. He was lean but muscled by constant exposure to physical labor and his face revealed an intelligence, an alertness, that both surprised and delighted me. Zeke was a California transplant, a divorce who drifted out of an unhappy marriage in the West, wandered from job to job, drank good whiskey under the skies of many states, until he met and fell in love with Ida McKee, a striking young blonde hitting a cash register in a general store near Bluffton, South Carolina. Zeke drove her to Georgia after a madcap courtship,
married her with the benediction of an itchy-palmed justice of the peace, and returned to Bluffton to begin the second act of his life in completely new surroundings. In fourteen years in Bluffton he had sired two sons and managed to worm his way so completely into Bennington’s life and make himself so indispensable that he sometimes seemed like Bennington’s third leg. When Bennington was in power, Zeke’s position was enviable, but now that Bennington’s career was in its eclipse, Zeke was beginning to feel the pressure of insecurity again.

  My relationship with Zeke Skimberry and his family started slowly and inauspiciously but gathered momentum and intimacy as the year passed. He was impossible to dislike. He loved to tease, to banter lightly with all who crossed his path, and to mimic the supervisors who ruled him. At our first meeting he told me, “People over here think you are crazy for teachin’ at that school.”

  “People over here are exactly right,” I answered.

  “Of course, all these people are crazy themselves, so there’s no tellin’,” he said with his eyes dancing, mischievous, and very blue. Then he said with great seriousness, “Course, the niggers on Yamacraw have needed something for a damn long time. I sure hope you can help those little nigger kids.”

  The most fascinating thing about Zeke Skimberry, however, was his irrepressible wife, Ida. She was a poetess of profanity, an oracle of epithets who could outcuss a bathroom wall. Unlike most women I have known, she placed no value on shallow pretensions or hypocritical displays of gentility. Her first words to me as I drove into her yard on a Sunday afternoon the first week in September marked her as a person to be handled gently and with caution. From the screened-in porch of her tiny house, she yelled, “What in the hell are you looking for?”

  “Ma’am, I’m looking for Zeke Skimberry, the janitor.”

  “He’s not a goddam janitor. He’s the maintenance man. Everybody’s always calling him a janitor. Well, who in the hell are you?” she asked with eyes ablazing.

  “I’m Pat Conroy, ma’am. I teach over on Yamacraw Island, and I was supposed to get in touch with your husband, Mrs. Skimberry.”

  “He ain’t here now. Come on inside and git yourself a cup of coffee.” As I got out of the car, she startled me again by saying, “Hot as a bitch, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it certainly is.”

  In no way had my mother with her air of gentility and fine breeding prepared me for the Ida Skimberrys of the world. The coffeepot, positioned in honorable perpetuity on the stove, was the center of the tiny Skimberry universe, and over the year we consumed gallons of the steaming, hot brew as Zeke rambled on about the idiosyncracies of his work or the insecurity of his position. Or Ida would curse fluently at the lack of money, at her husband’s lack of status, or at her inability to find a decent job.

  During the week I parked my car in the Skimberrys’ yard under Ida’s vigilant eye. After my second week on the island, after Zeke had picked me up at Alljoy Landing, and after consuming three cups of coffee while describing the events of the week, I walked out to my car to discover that Ida had washed the car and cleaned out the inside during the week. She had also found a sack of dirty clothes in the backseat. She had washed and ironed all the clothes and neatly folded them in a cardboard box. I was overwhelmed by this kindness. I thanked her with genuine emotion, but all she said was, “Shit, the goddam car needed washin’ and the goddam clothes needed a good cleanin’.” Then her face, which could be hard as a callus, softened into a magnificently warm smile and she said, “I enjoy doin’ things for people.”

  It did not take me long to warm to this kind of people. And just as I had entered a new realm of experience on Yamacraw, I also walked on fresh territory each time I entered the door to Zeke and Ida’s house. My background did not expose me to white people who subsisted on $4000 a year, who did not have a set of china for special meals, who did not select a pattern of silver, and who had not graduated from high school. I had never dealt directly with people who felt their lives enriched by weekly odysseys to wrestling matches. The Skimberrys were of a different social class than I and one of the year’s miracles was my introduction to their way of life, to their complete and ingenuous acceptance of me as a friend, and to the perspective they gave me of society and the men on top as viewed from the bottom.

  I came to love the Skimberrys devotedly, for without reason, they took me into their home, told me their dreams and disappointments, shared with me the intimate secrets and compromises of their lives. They bared their souls before me because of an elementary honesty that did not understand guile or pretense. I was part of their life and it became important to the Yamacraw story as events took place and circumstances shifted. And how many mornings or afternoons do I remember Ida’s voice rasping, as I came through the door, “Pat, you ol’ son of a bitch, git you some coffee.”

  I saw the town of Bluffton through the eyes of Zeke Skimberry. In the early morning, before the insect noise had died in the woods near his house, Zeke would sit in his favorite chair, sip hot coffee from a thick, cream-colored mug, and talk about the town. He was one of those men who were gifted storytellers, who could capture the spirit of a place by recounting forgotten incidents, or by digging up skeletons the town might have preferred to leave buried and untouched. Zeke knew the merchants, the cheaters, the lonely, the schizophrenic, the lusty, the insane, the religious, the hypocritical, the blacks, the rednecks, the generous. He knew them all and could sketch an accurate biography of everyone who lived in town. He knew who slept with whom, who wanted to sleep with whom, and who would sleep with whom. He could list every murder that had occurred in the past ten years, how much blood was lost, where the bullet or knife struck, and how stiff the body was when discovered by authorities. He knew the authorities, too, with all their frailties and flaws, with all their weaknesses and pretensions. It was over coffee that I learned about Zeke and Ida and grew to love them. Their house was alive with joy, laughter, and worry over money, derision of professionals and hacks; their house was warm, good, and filled with coffee smells. And both of them loved to talk of their town.

  Bluffton perched above the winding, tide-ruled May River, egrets fished its shores, and fleets of long bateaux explored the blind inlets and creeks in search of productive oyster beds. Bluffton is a town of matchless serenity, a town thick with glinting, towering magnolias, impressive oaks, sloughs glutted with wildflowers, peeling but remarkably attractive houses. A church built from cypress stands beside the river; a structure of elegant simplicity and fine lines built by slaves, and presided over by the omnipresent town pillar, the deacon of deacons, Ezra Bennington. Bluffton is sleepy, magisterially silent, and enjoys a benediction of flowers every brilliant spring. Yet it is a town that retains many of the wrinkles and arthritic cramps of the Old South.

  There was the story of Thomas, a massive black man whom Zeke and I often passed in the morning on our way to gas up. Thomas would sit in the middle of a large group of animated black men on the steps of a crumbling tenement. He was incredibly large, a redwood among the smaller pines.

  “That’s a damn big nigger, ain’t he,” Zeke would say.

  “Yep,” I would reply rurally.

  “He’s had a tough life, ol’ Thomas. When he was just a young boy, not more’n about fifteen or sixteen, he used to help deliver ice door to door. Now those were the days when there wasn’t such things as refrigerators. When you said icebox, you meant a damn box with a big hunk of ice in it. So ol’ Thomas, being a big son of a bitch, could lift them hunks of ice pretty easy and carry them door to door. One day he went up to a house at Alljoy Beach and knocked on the door. A young white girl answered his knock. Well, Thomas didn’t talk real good, anyway, so he got real nervous and asked this white girl if she wanted a piece, meaning a piece of ice for the icebox. Well, the girl misunderstood what Thomas was tryin’ to say, you know, thought he was trying to give her a piece of his pecker. She screamed and raised hell till every white man in town was running down to her. Now you know
how this town is, now. Can you imagine what those people were thinkin’ then? This big ol’ Thomas trying to get into a little white girl’s britches. He was lucky they didn’t lynch him and cut his balls off. As it was, they tried him and sent him up for twenty-somethin’ years. All the time, Thomas just stood there looking kind of dumb and muttering that all he wanted was to sell her some ice. The bad thing about it, Pat, was that this girl was crazy as hell, anyway. A month after the trial she went completely nuts and spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital.”

  “What a horrible, goddam story, Zeke.”

  “Just goes to show you that people will shit on a nigger and never think a thing about it. People around here are just prejudiced against niggers. Want to see them all dead. Want to see them all shipped back to Africa. All these good Christian people.”

  “Good Christian people” was the most cynical epithet in Zeke’s repertoire. He and Ida had been very active members of the local Baptist church until the congregation voted to close the church if a nigger ever tried to attend a service. Zeke and Ida simply never went back after that.

  “Can you imagine, Pat. A bunch of Christians keeping another bunch of Christians from praying. Can you see Jesus sitting at the front door of the church saying, ’Hey, you shit-eatin’ niggers, you can’t come in this here church. Go to your own nigger church.’ Yeh, I can just see Jesus doing that.”

  Zeke and Ida mouthed the regional prejudices against blacks constantly, and believed implicitly in almost every stereotype ever concocted against blacks in the South. Yet every black man or woman I brought to their house was invited inside, offered coffee, and treated with dignity and warmth. Later, Ida would tell me, “That was sure a nice nigger man you brought here this morning. I hope you bring him back again real soon.”